How Initial Bounty Offering Can Help the Unbanked, Explained

What is an Initial Bounty Offering?
It’s an incentivized framework.

Initial Bounty Offerings, or IBOs, are a structured way to crowdsource human resources, business development, marketing, and user acquisition. They offer network tokens in exchange for contributions to the ecosystem. This allows a blockchain organization to expand its reach as well as crowdsource from a large pool of people worldwide to complete tasks or projects.

An IBO can offer bounties for services, user inputs, products and any other work the platform needs to grow. They can be calculated using real-world raw costs and inputs or by standards set out by network founders.

What are the types of bounties are out there?
There are multiple types.

Depending on the participants’ skill sets and resources, they can be:

Bounty Hunters. Individuals who actively complete bounties and claim token rewards during the Initial Bounty Offering period.
Benefactors. Individuals who choose to support a project’s mission purchasing a certain amount of bounties and receiving tokens in return.
Builders. People who participate in the bounty offering by building products and services the platform requires to live long and prosper.
Users. Users of the network who sign up during the IBO period and receive a nominal amount of initial tokens to use towards payment for services.
Promoters. Partners, organizations, and individuals who claim promotion-based bounties that advertise and market the U.CASH platform.
Partners. External networks and platforms, such as exchanges, wallets, payment processors and others are rewarded with tokens for integrating into the network.

What do you do with them once you pay for them?
Decide for yourself.

Once paid, holders of bounty tokens then decide on their own what they want to do with them: exchange them in the open market for cash or digital currency, use them to pay for goods and services inside the network or hold onto them for future use.

Those who want to participate but aren’t interested in completing bounties themselves, though, can become “benefactors”. A benefactor pays the value of a bounty to the organization, which allows the organization itself to hire others to complete it.

Why an IBO and not an ICO?
Participation, distribution network growth.

Since the ICO market cap is fairly small compared to the entire cryptocurrency market, large buyers can easily manipulate an ICO and provide unfair benefits to a small group of people at the expense of the rest of the community. If these buyers are quick to the market, they can buy up the vast majority of tokens in minutes, cutting out the average user as well as adversely affecting the future of that token.

ICOs are also only available to those who have the capital to invest and cryptocurrencies to process investments. By its very nature, this excludes a large portion of the world’s population. An estimated two billion adults are considered “unbanked” – that is, they lack access to financial institutions that most of us take for granted. Many of them, however, do have internet access, which makes them ideally suited for getting involved in the world of cryptocurrency. By distributing tokens through an IBO model, it allows those without the financial means to get involved and contribute in other ways.

What is the current state of the traditional banking system?
Expensive, non-transparent and non-inclusive.

Traditional banking services are slow in their ability to innovate and adapt. That’s why they have had issues quickly growing, technologically savvy populations in the developing world. At the same time, small entities usually provide financial services with high regulatory and maintenance costs, closed-source APIs, expensive hardware and software modules and intense security. This always ends up with high transaction costs, complex procedures, and delays.

Over 2 billion adults don’t have access to formal financial services (access to loans, sending and receiving funds, secure asset holdings, etc.). They are mostly based in countries with developing economies such as Africa, the Middle East, East Asia and the Pacific region. Underdeveloped banking infrastructure, high costs of financial services, lack of proper government identification - these are, along with low income, frequent civil conflicts and wars are all contributing factors to the limited banking presence outside major urban centers in those economies.

How can blockchains and IBOs provide financial inclusion?
A peer-to-peer financial services network might help.

IBOs are used as a method to distribute network tokens and incentivize participation. Network tokens are universal access keys which give users access to services on the network as well as advanced functionalities.

By providing tokens in an IBO format, rather than through an ICO, anyone who has access to the internet can become a part of the ecosystem in exchange for their expertise.

Pairing the IBO format with a blockchain-based financial platform and digital asset converter network can take things one step further. Platforms, such as U.CASH, can convert fiat money into secure holdings of digital assets from different points of the world. They can also offer access to a wide range of digital currency services (buy, sell, trade, and store digital/virtual currencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and others), financial services (loans, bill payments, remittance and foreign exchange), legal and human services (notarization, escrow and identity).

How does that work?
Let’s see.

Converters allow users to load and unload money onto the platform in local currency. They can be retail converters (money service businesses, commercial stores, and retail shops), individual mobile converters (who can meet with users to do in-person conversions) or online converters (who provide remote services such as online deposits and transfers). Converters set their service offering details such as fees, operating hours, user verification levels and can take advantage of built-in accounting and integrated compliance systems.

Through the U.CASH platform, people from different regions of the world will be able to access financial services, and through the IBO model, they won’t need to possess cryptocurrencies to do that.

To find out how it works go here.