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Signature Bounties for Decentralized Apps on the New Internet

On August 16th Blockstack announced the Blockstack Signature Fund — a $25 million dollar fund of thesis-driven VCs supporting teams looking to build for the long term on the new internet.

The Blockstack Signature Fund is now announcing the first of a series of global bounties to build decentralized apps on the new internet.

We call them Signature Bounties.

Unlike a traditional bug or software bounty where the first team to claim it gets the prize, these bounties are more like contests where teams from all over the world submit products and a set of judges determine who wins the prize for the best product.

Bounties are a useful tool for building out important apps on the new internet because they leverage a global community of developers, designers, and other talented folks to work on bringing interesting ideas into reality. Since apps built using Blockstack don’t own their user’s data or identity, they can be expanded on or repurposed by other teams as the basis for more complex apps that build out an ecosystem.

The first Signature Bounty is led by Compound VC and USV’s Albert Wenger for $25,000 to build an encrypted token portfolio app using Blockstack Auth and Storage libraries.

We plan to announce more bounties from top investors like Naval Ravikant and Albert Wenger over the next several months. If you are interested in hearing about future bounties, sign up here. If you are interested in running your own bounty, contact [email protected].

Patrick Stanley

Patrick Stanley

Patrick Stanley is the head of growth at Blockstack. He studied Economics and Psychology at Johns Hopkins, and was the first employee at data-driven lending startup Earnest which sold to Navient for $155m in 2017. In a growth role there, he helped it scale from from 1 to 200 employees and go from $0 to $2B in originations within 3 years.