Everybody knows the news by now. Pump launched GO last Thursday and, according to most of the commentary on X, we have a few weeks left before the world descends into anarchy.
I've seen all the takes. It's going to get banned. It proves that crypto is actively evil. It's literally Black Mirror.
And I do agree that Pump's marketing here leaves a lot to be desired. The "incentivize chaos" angle is obviously not my GTM strategy with poidh.
But I also believe the concept of bounties in general is catching undeserved hate because a single actor decided to launch their take on it.
Permissionless human coordination is still the coolest thing made possible by crypto, and bounties will inevitably be a part of the way it changes the world.
So here's why you should embrace the tech instead of dooming.
Much of this week's bounty discourse has ignored that bounties are one of the oldest and most widespread forms of coordination tech.
Civilizations run on bounties. They are simple offers of: "If someone achieves X outcome, they'll receive Y reward."
All of the following are forms of bounties:
Hiring a contractor
Paying a salesperson on commission
Offering a reward for lost property
Research grants
Prize competitions
They're also proven tech. I don't think anyone would push back on the fact that bug bounties are an excellent use of resources for tech companies.
A platform that lets you offer money for someone else to do something is about as basic an economic tool as there is.
So why are these new crypto bounty platforms causing hysteria?
Because they're internet native.
Peer-to-peer "do this and I'll pay you" services have always seemed like a potential internet use case, but past implementations have run into issues because payments aren't built into the online world.
We've settled for gig marketplaces like Fiverr and TaskRabbit, but these have issues. Their central management of payments leads to the messy business of dealing with fraud, chargebacks, and geographic restrictions. This means they have to charge massive fees behind the scenes.
So, while the internet is unmatched at allowing humans to share information online, it's fallen drastically short at the economics of coordinating action. Money doesn't flow as seamlessly as a post.
Crypto is the internet's best form of money. If you need to pay someone online, nothing is faster or more efficient at transferring value across borders almost instantly.
If you want to pay someone to do something, anything, in crypto... it just works.
That's amazing. But in many ways, it's also terrifying.
And that response is natural. Humans are hard wired to be risk averse and new things are trigger our fear of the unknown.
But there's a real signal in this fear response. Nobody was scared of the potential for crypto to be used as e-commerce payment rails. Paying for a coffee with Bitcoin just seemed like that natural next step because that's the type of payment people have always made.
Same with DeFi. The thinking goes, "money is used for finance, we've invented a new form of money, we should use it to do finance". Nobody bats an eye, nobody's scared of it, and everyone agrees it's a good idea.
But when you get to permissionless, free-form, global bounties, you are unlocking a whole new thing that's never been possible before crypto. There's no frame of reference for the average person to grab onto.
It's a bit daunting. And that's why it's one of the most important things the industry can work on right now.
It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, — 'Always do what you are afraid to do.' - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Heroism
Now, I don't think Pump decided to create a marketplace simply because "they thought it was scary". But their foray into the industry makes it clear how big this new opportunity is.
Most people were surprised by the Pump bounty announcement. The general reaction can be summed up as "ok sure I guess why not?"
But what our friend Orangie is missing is that bounties as a product make perfect sense based on the data that Pump has.
A downstream effect of Pump's success as a memecoin launchpad is that it's the online home for diverse, distributed, global communities.
What kinds of communities? Memecoin communities. People who bought a token and rally around their shared dream of one thing and one thing only. Make that token price go up.
As anyone in the industry knows, these people are relentless. They do whatever they possibly can to bring attention and virality to their token of choice.
They know what drives impressions on the internet. Videos, clips, pics, media. Anything related to their coin that might snag a few seconds of someone's attention in the feed. And they're willing to pay for that content.
Pump created their marketplace because they knew that paid bagworking content was already a tried and true strategy for the communities that call their platform home. It was a logical next step in helping them be more effective.
They're not doing this because they want to stoke outrage (although I'm sure they're not mad at the viral media coverage). They're doing this because they have more consumer crypto knowledge than any app in existence, and that told them that bounties are an essential product for online communities.
I've been bootstrapping my bounty platform @poidhxyz for almost 3 years now and have seen the same pattern across our 1,800 completed bounties.
The way you get people excited about making, contributing to, or claiming bounties is by tapping into existing community energy.
Our biggest bounty ever came from rallying to break a skateboarding world record on behalf of @degentokenbase. Our second biggest came from the @farcaster_xyz community rallying to fund conference NFC badges. Our third biggest was a viral onboarding contest to promote @baseapp, started by an everyday Base community member.
There have been plenty of one-off peer-to-peer bounties as well for silly, small tasks. But the bounties that attract the most inertia tap into existing online communities who already have a reason to rally together for a goal.
It's also worth noting that poidh (unlike Pump) is 100% permissionless with crowdfunding built in. We are open source, non-custodial, and privacy-friendly. Our bounty "oracle" is decentralized
and we have 0 control over what gets paid out.
Nonetheless, we have not had an issue with unsavory bounties.
Why not? Three factors:
Anon bounty game theory doesn't favor truly unsavory acts
While our contracts are permissionless, our frontend is moderated
We don't pursue them
Pump (and its older sibling @daremarket) make a point of incentivizing outrageous bounties with their marketing. We don't, because we want to build the bounty platform for all online communities, not just hyperonline degens.
There is energy in almost every online community to get things done, and focusing only on the existing crypto audience misses that opportunity.
Video game communities want to crowdfund world records.
but crowdfunding/escrow is a hassle that often leads to drama
people want to pool money to incentivize records, but the coordination layer is the weak point
much to think about
youtube.com/watch?v=qsT08n…
Local communities want to crowdsource things to be fixed.
Now that SeeClickFix is part of the City of Abilene Mobile app, learn more about the process - and the people - behind every request
bit.ly/43hFwZL
And tech people always want to incentivize breakthrough tech.
I'm sure they could be crowdfunded well beyond $1M via open action markets cc @8ctopuso
On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and
Once you start looking for potential community action markets, you see them everywhere. And poidh wants to be the online home for all of them, not just forehead tattoo markets.
Fears are there for a reason. New things can seem dangerous. But it's up to us to determine whether that fear is logical or if the new thing we're discovering is genuinely useful.
Based on Pump's moves into the market and my experience with poidh, I think our fears are more rooted in discovering a legitimately new frontier for crypto. Something that capitalizes on our global, decentralized, permissionless roots instead of trying to force the product into existing paradigms like finance or payments.
We can debate moderation policies, platform design, and where the lines should be drawn. But the ability for people to pool resources and rally around shared goals is too useful to disappear. The internet solved information. Crypto solved value transfer. The next frontier is coordination, and bounties are one of the most promising tools we've found to make it happen.
If you want to help us build, reach out to me. We always need new people contributing to the GitHub or making bounties. I'm happy to personally help you draft an idea, add funding, and promote your initiative.
If you want to help us scale, we're currently raising a funding round so I can go full-time and make poidh seamless to use for communities around the world. If you're interested, reach out via DM on X or Telegram (@kennyistyping), and I can send you all the details.
Let's win together. 🤝
I think the Pump move makes it obvious that action markets / social bounties / reverse prediction markets (or whatever you want to call them) have massive potential
people want markets that coordinate actions
whoever gets the recipe right will win big
also no built-in trustless crowdfunding
if you want the non-corposlop version, choose @poidhxyz