Polkadot: Anti-Scam bounty as a way to combat scams

Polkadot has announced its Bounty Anti-Scam Program as the initiative that rewards community users who fight scams by making the protocol more secure. 

Polkadot and the Bounty Anti-Scam to combat scams and makes the protocol secure

Polkadot has decided to incentivize its community to participate in its Bounty Anti-Scam program, an initiative aimed at fighting scams and making the protocol more secure. 

Specifically, Polkadot reports that the new program has already been active since February 2022, after a series of experiments that have involved the community from the very beginning. 

In this regard, two initiatives were created first: one in which community members would find and remove scam websites and another in which they would do the same for fraudulent Telegram groups.  

The first initiative was a resounding success. From September 2021 through the end of February 2022, participants in the initiative found 1,661 scam websites targeting Polkadot users and took down more than 95% of them. In contrast, its Telegram version was not nearly as successful. 

The Anti-Scam Bounty subsequently incorporated all of the participants’ ideas such as detecting and removing scam websites, or fake social media profiles and phishing apps, in order to protect crypto-wallets and create an anti-scam dashboard to serve as a central hub for all activities in the ecosystem. 

Bounty incentives are in DOT, although as of June 2022 it appears that the denomination of the rewards has changed to USD so as to allow users better financial planning. As a result, rewards in DOT have increased significantly.

Polkadot: decentralizing protocol security.

Initially, the Polkadot Web3 Foundation set up partnerships to protect the protocol from scams in a centralized way. 

Indeed, it partnered with PhishFort, an anti-phishing company specializing in cryptocurrency, to detect and dismantle fake websites and social media instances. After a year of collaboration, Web3 Foundation switched to another major company in the industry, Allure Security.

Only later, by involving the community itself in the security objective, did Polkadot begin to act in a decentralized way. 

The Anti-Scam Bounty has distributed more than 16,000 DOT in rewards to date. Not only that, from March 2022 until the end of October 2022, a total of 5524 sites were posted, most of which were removed in the same or subsequent months. This is a 270% increase over the previous initiative. 

The price of DOT

At the time of writing, Polkadot (DOT) ranks 11th by market capitalization, and is worth $5.45. 

Just like all cryptocurrencies, DOT suffered a price dump after the FTX crypto-exchange collapsed earlier this month. And indeed, from the price of $7.11, DOT dropped to $5.44 in one day, reaching lows of $5 during the following days. 

Looking at the graph of DOT’s price over the past year, it can be observed that the real dumps occurred first in early January 2022 and then in early May 2022. 

In the former case, DOT went from a price of $27 to $18, and in May from $16 to $8.