Bountycaster is a new service for creating and completing paid bounties online, leveraging cryptocurrency, decentralized social networks, and AI.
Bountycaster leverages the Farcaster network for identity and content. Users sign in with their Farcaster account and post bounty descriptions to the Farcaster network. On the backend, Bountycaster monitors posts to Farcaster, and uses AI to parse the bounty content.
The service elegantly interweaves four powerful new technologies in a simple way:
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Borderless payments – bounty payments are made in USDC or ETH, which can settle to any person in seconds at low fees, regardless of where they live.
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Open content networks – Farcaster allows anyone to monitor and parse content on the network (unlike traditional social platforms), and integrate all relevant communication and engagement into their own service.
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Decentralized social identity and reputation - bounties are tied to Farcaster identities, which are not controlled or censored by a centralized entity and therefore entail significantly less platform risk for users. Over time, this compounds the value of these identities through aggregated cross-platform reputation.
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AI is used to simplify the user experience, replacing tedious forms with written prose – which presumably will work across languages as well.
A Personal Example
Today I wrote a bounty for $100 on Farcaster and tagged the Bountycaster bot account. The bot immediately parsed my prose and responded with a confirmation that the bounty had been posted.
Within seconds, the Bountycaster website reflected the bounty, and minutes later I was receiving responses from participants. I can read these responses on the Farcaster network, using the delightful Warpcast mobile app, or directly on the Bountycaster website.
In the screenshot above, we see that engagement on the bounty from the Farcaster network is reflected on Bountycaster interface – demonstrating the interweaving of social content across platforms that leverages the development of both teams.
A safer and more bountiful web
The interoperability between Farcaster and Bountycaster perfectly illustrates why decentralized social projects stand to gain network effects more quickly than traditional rivals.
Not only is the content interoperable, but so is the accrual of reputation tied to the identities who use these networks – online identities that, for once, are owned by communities and not corporations.
The core technologies that power these new networks are also open-source, giving us an unprecedented ability to scrutinize network power and adjudicate network security.
Conclusions
Bountycaster was co-founded by two exceptional builders: Linda Xie, an early PM at Coinbase and former co-founder of Scalar Capital, and Daniel Pyrathon, a former engineer from Phantom and 0x. They have demonstrated a beautiful understanding of how to weave together the best of multiple technologies into a simple and useful product, and have executed remarkably to bring that to market with a lean MVP that gets the job done.
Needless to say, I’m excited to use Bountycaster and watch the progress towards an improved web with more efficient economics as well as safer and more robust identity and social features.