Bounty Programs: Get Paid as a Blockchain Developer – Without Much Experience

Headhunters have their hands full. Trying to recruit computer science grads from Stanford, MIT and Berkeley for blockchain startups means luring them away from fintech jobs on Wall Street and six-figure tech jobs in Silicon Valley.

With the explosion of blockchain opportunities, hiring in today’s climate is more unchartered than ever. An applicant without any formal training but with relevant technical achievements and a command of smart contracts and digital ledger technology can go toe-to-toe with a candidate from a top school who has a degree but no outside coding projects.

The dearth of applicants is giving birth to a whole new flexible career path for aspiring blockchain developers. New bounty programs and incentives are popping up to reach star newbies – with or without degrees –  transforming the recruiting process for this highly sought after skill set into a creative sport.

City of Zion (CoZ) Software Bounty Program

The City of Zion, a global, independent group of open source developers, designers and translators formed to support the NEO core and ecosystem, announced its first software bounty program. They are looking to explore improvements to the dBFT protocol used on the NEO network.

Reward: $50,000 paid in NEO and GAS

Eligible to participate: Anyone

Languages: Any language; Python, Go, or C# preferred

Work: Open source on the CoZ Github

Ethereum Bounty Program

The Ethereum Bounty Program provides bounties for bugs. You can earn rewards for finding a vulnerability and get a place on the leaderboard.

Rewards: Points vary based on the severity of the vulnerability. One point currently corresponds to $1 payable in ETH or BTC.

• Critical: up to 25,000 points
• High: up to 15,000 points
• Medium: up to 10,000 points
• Low: up to 2,000 points
• Note: up to 500 points

Types of vulnerabilities:

• Protocol security
• Implementation security
• Network security
• Node security
• Client application security
• Cryptographic primitives security
• ENS security
• Solidity language security

Hyperledger Bug Bounty Program

Hyperledger is the industry-wide open source initiative for blockchain technology that is run by The Linux Foundation. It was running a private bug bounty with HackerOne, but recently opened up its bounty for public participation.

Rewards: Based on the severity of the vulnerability. One point currently corresponds to $1 payable in ETH or BTC.

• Critical: minimum $2,000
• High: minimum $1,500
• Medium: minimum $500
• Low: minimum $200

Hyperledger is also offering a free online course on setting up a Hyperledger Fabric test network for analysis.

TenX Bug Bounty Program

TenX is using their bug bounty program to keep their users’ wallets safe. To achieve that goal they’re turning to the community to take part in finding any potential security risks to their system.

Rewards: Paid in BTC based on the severity of the vulnurability.

• Remote Code Execution: up to $10,000
• Manipulation of account balance: up to $5,000
• Vulnerability resulting in financial loss (depending on severity): up to 2,000 – $5,000
• Loss of privileged information (passwords, API keys, private keys, etc.): up to $3,000
• Loss of user personal information (addresses, phone numbers, etc): up to $1,000
• Authentication bypass: up to $1,000

FundRequest

FundRequest is a decentralized marketplace for open source collaboration. Developers can fix bugs or program additional features for existing applications. The platform allows a user to create a request for a feature they want to see or a bug they’ve identified. After validation by the Ethereum blockchain, a smart contract is generated. Users can then fund or crowdfund open source issues on GitHub using FND tokens. Developers claim the tokens after successfully resolving the issue.

Related: What skills do I need to become a blockchain developer?