ICOs develop new measures to attract communities: enter the ‘Bounty Bot’
A bounty or airdrop campaign can be seen as a series of tasks which can be completed by the ICOs community in order to earn project tokens. More often than not, these tasks are extremely similar. Think along the lines of sharing social media content, translating the website or creating original content on Youtube and Medium. It creates a win-win scenario for projects and the bounty campaign participants. The community and exposure grows at a low cost, while the bounty hunters receive tokens, which can become most valuable in the future.
The original method of managing such a bounty program is to organize and maintain a forum post on bitcointalk.org, which is a backbone internet forum of the crypto community. Every new project is expected to go there and announce their project. Two pages are created by projects; one for the announcement of the ICO and one for the announcement and maintenance of said bounty program.
However, managing campaigns through a forum seems like ancient technology in today’s environment and hasn’t really changed much for a dozen years; a stark contradiction with blockchain technology. Users are expected to post links, wade through multiple documents to submit their work and confusion prevails as the bounty program lay-out is not standardized. Moreover, it is not engaging and will not attract many users aside from the usual ‘bounty hunters’; professional participants of bounty programs, who enrich their wallets with tokens from a variety of products. It was time for a change.
As a result, a movement occurred within ICO projects, where bounty programs were being managed from the website. Inside the project’s own portal, a dedicated bounty page was created, where bounty hunters and other users could participate and earn tokens. Bounty programs started to include more physical rewards in order to appeal more to participants. Because of the improved UI that custom web design offers, more features could be built in, and the ease of reporting a completed task improved. In addition, the initial wave of excitement brought in new participants; all eager to feast their eyes on the new age of token distribution. The downsides include that accessing the page isn’t easy, logging in is required and the user is not repeatedly reminded of the campaign, as it is not present in the eco-system where they usually reside.
The latest development in bounty manager technology is the creating of ‘bounty bots’; Telegram bots who manage the project’s bounty and / or airdrop campaigns. It is an interactive experience, involves humour and most importantly, is found directly inside the Telegram client. The bounty bots have a variety of different features, as this trend has only recently emerged. Participants can conveniently see their collected amount of project tokens, completed and awaiting tasks, and so on. It also gives the user easy access to digital content to share across social media platforms.
A challenge we find with the bounty bot system is that it is limited to the options provided by Telegram in terms of integration and UI. From the project’s perspective, a solid bounty bot can take weeks to develop, so as to provide an optimal user experience. A droid we particularly enjoyed is the ‘MoneyBot’ developed by the Anything App, a blockchain project from the Netherlands. Its charming appearance captured our hearts. Together with the strong development work, it combines into a highly enjoyable experience. It went viral just two days after launch and is a solid performance for one of the first bounty bots. Undoubtedly, bounty bots will develop even further in the future and the ones released in Q3 will likely already be leaps and bounds ahead.
From bitcointalk, to dedicated web pages, to bounty bots; bounty campaign management has undergone a lot of change in a young market. Whether the campaign is developed by the team itself, or outsourced to a third party, a lot of management and development time is involved. The bounty bots are the latest iteration and we find them to be the most appealing variant yet.
If you would like to learn more about bounty bots, we would refer you to the earlier mentioned MoneyBot, which can be found here.