"Is ""Bounty Hunting"" The Next High-Paying Freelance Career?"

Many software companies offer bounties to anyone who can find glitches in their code that could open the door to hacking. But often, it’s hard for those who find errors to collect the cash, says Pascal Thellmann, an entrepreneur based in Munich, Germany. When a techie reports a vulnerability, he told me, “these companies decide not to make the payment. Maybe from their point of view it doesn’t qualify.” For instance, the work of several “bounty hunters” may have contributed to the discovery of the vulnerability in a company’s code, making it hard to determine who should get the prize. Because people with coding knowledge aren’t sure if they’ll see any rewards, they sometimes opt out of bounty programs—meaning companies miss out on important knowledge that could prevent hacking. And, at the same time, individuals who could potentially make a living finding these vulnerabilities can’t count on doing so, because they never know if they’ll get paid. At the startup Bounty0x.io, Thellmann and two co-founders aim to change that. Their vision is to create an alternative freelance career path built on blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Thellmann has a copywriting background. Co-founder Angelo Adam is an attorney, while co-founder Deniz Dalkilic is a software engineer. Their startup, launched in June 2017, aims to make it worthwhile for coders to uncover software vulnerabilities by taking the payment of the bounties out of the hands of the companies offering them, known as bounty hosts. The trio believes existing freelance platforms are not ideally suited to connecting such hosts to techies who want to earn the bounties because they don’t have a reviewing service to vet submissions from the bounty hunters. Bounty0x.io aims to make it easier for techies to earn a living from catching coding vulnerabilities for software comapnies. Credit: Shutterstock At Bounty0x.io, companies seeking help in uncovering coding weaknesses can put a piece of code in blockchain, where it can’t be changed by anyone. To offer a bounty to anyone who finds such a weakness, the companies must send the money to a Smart Contract on the blockchain app platform Ethereum, meaning these firms no longer control the money. Smart Contracts are digital versions of traditional contracts that run on blockchain and can be programmed to execute automatically. In theory, Smart Contracts reduce the risk of someone being cheated, because they don’t depend on third-party enforcement.