Posting a dare
You write the task, you pick the reward, you fund the address Pounty gives you. Everything after that runs on its own.
First, an account
Posting needs an account, and making one is one field: a username. No email, no password, no wallet. Pounty remembers your browser and hands you a recovery code for signing in elsewhere. Every dare you post is tied to that account, so refunds, extension requests and your history all find you. Prefer X? You can also post by mentioning the bot, and the account is created for you from your X handle: see the X bot.
Writing it
A dare needs a title and a difficulty. The description is optional, but it is where the dare is actually decided: an admin later has to judge whether a stranger's proof matches what you asked for. Say what has to happen, where the proof has to come from, and what would count as cheating.
| Field | Required | Rule |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Yes | Up to 200 characters after trimming. |
| Description | No | Up to 2000 characters. |
| Difficulty | Yes | One of Easy, Medium, Hard, Extreme. |
| Proof requirement | Yes | At least one of: a link to a post (tweet, TikTok, Reel…), a photo, a video. Combinations are allowed. |
Control characters are stripped from both text fields before they are stored. One account can create five dares per hour.
Proof requirements
For anything that lives on a platform, a tweet, a TikTok, a Reel, a thread, pick Link to a post: the hunter pastes the URL, and you judge the post where it is, views and replies included. A dare with that switch refuses a submission that has no link.
The photo and video switches are what a hunter's uploaded files are checked against. A dare marked video-required rejects a submission made of photos only. A hunter who submits an external link instead of files satisfies both switches, because the server cannot inspect what is behind a link.
So treat the switches as a statement of what you expect, and the description as the thing that is actually enforced, by a person, at review time.
Reward token and amount
Pick one of the supported tokens and enter the amount in token units, not dollars. The amount is parsed against that token's decimals: 18 for ETH, WETH and every stock, 6 for USDG. More fraction digits than the token allows is rejected.
The dollar figure beside the amount is a live quote, and the server decides it, not your browser. The value at creation is stored as a snapshot on the dare, and the site keeps showing the current value next to it.
| Rule | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Minimum | The reward must be worth at least $2 at the price the server reads when you submit the form. |
| Unknown price | If the feed has no quote for that token at that moment, creation is refused with an error instead of guessed. |
| Balance check | If your account has a linked wallet, the server checks that wallet holds enough of the token first. If that check fails because the RPC is slow or down, it logs a warning and lets you through. |
| Amount | A positive decimal. Zero is rejected. |
How long it stays open
The form offers three ways to set the same number: presets of 2 hours, 6 hours, 24 hours and one week; a custom span in days plus hours; or an explicit end date and time. All three resolve to a duration in hours, rounded to four decimals, and the server validates that one number.
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Minimum | 2 hours (2 hours) |
| Maximum | 5 years (43,800 hours) |
The clock does not start when you fill in the form. It starts when the escrow is funded: at that moment the dare's creation time is reset to now and its expiry is set to now plus the duration you chose. A dare you fund forty minutes late still gets its full window.
The refund address
You can give an EVM address that any refund should go back to. It is optional for token rewards. It is not optional for ETH.
The reason is mechanical. An ERC-20 transfer emits a log, so if a token dare has to be refunded the server can find the transfer into the escrow and read the sender's address off the chain. A native ETH transfer emits nothing. An ETH dare with no refund address and no linked wallet would have nowhere to send the money back to, so the API refuses to create it: A refund address is required for ETH rewards.
If your account has a wallet linked, that wallet covers the requirement and the field becomes optional again. Setting an explicit refund address is still safer, because it is the first destination tried.
Do not fund a dare straight from an exchange without setting a refund address. With no refund address and no linked wallet, the refund goes back to the address that paid, and for an exchange that is the exchange's own hot wallet, not your account.
Funding it
When the dare is created Pounty generates a new wallet for it and shows you the address. That address is the escrow, and it belongs to this dare alone. Send the exact token and the exact amount to it, from any wallet or exchange that can reach Robinhood Chain (chain ID 4663).
The QR code on the funding screen is an EIP-681 payment link, which wallets that support the standard read as a prefilled transfer. A native ETH reward asks for a value transfer to the escrow; a token reward asks for a transfer call on the token contract with the escrow as recipient.
ETH ethereum:<escrow>@4663?value=<wei> Token ethereum:<token>@4663/transfer?address=<escrow>&uint256=<base units>
If your wallet does not read the code, copy the deposit address and the amount from the same screen and send the transfer by hand. For a stock or USDG reward you send that token. Sending ETH to a dare whose reward is a stock does not fund it.
What the app watches for
The server does not wait for one specific transaction. It reads the escrow's balance: the native balance for an ETH dare, balanceOf(escrow) for a token dare. When the balance covers the reward, the dare goes live. It does not matter which wallet sent the funds, or how many transfers it took.
While the funding screen is open your browser polls that check every five seconds. The scheduler checks independently on its own tick, so closing the tab does not stop a dare from going live. You can also hand the server a transaction hash, and it will verify that transaction paid at least the required amount into the escrow.
A token dare needs the full amount. An ETH dare is allowed a small shortfall, so that wallets which round an amount down to leave room for gas still count: depending on which check runs, a balance at or above 95% or 99% of the reward activates it. Do not plan around that tolerance. Send the amount you were shown.
Partial, late and missing payments
| What happened | What Pounty does |
|---|---|
| You send more than the reward | The whole balance stays in the escrow, and the whole balance is what moves later. The extra goes to the winner, less the platform fee, or back to you on a refund. |
| You send less than the reward | The dare stays in pending_payment and never appears as live. Topping it up later still activates it. If nobody completes the payment, 24 hours after creation the balance is swept back to you. |
| You never send anything | One hour after creation the dare is cancelled. Nothing was held, so there is nothing to refund. |
| You send after it was cancelled | For 24 hours after creation the escrow of a cancelled dare is still watched. Money that lands there is scheduled for a refund, not used to bring the dare back. |
| You cancel it yourself | You can cancel your own dare while it is still pending payment. The same 24-hour late-payment watch applies afterwards. |
Every one of those refunds goes to the refund address, then your linked wallet, then the address the server can prove funded the escrow, in that order. If none of them is known and valid, the money stays in the escrow until an admin moves it by hand. See expiry and refunds.
After it is live
You cannot cancel a funded dare and you cannot pull the money back before the timer ends. If the dare expires with no approved submission, the refund runs on its own.
A hunter can ask you for one extension while the dare is active and in its last quarter of time. The length is fixed by the original duration: one hour for a 2-hour dare, three hours up to 6 hours, twelve hours up to 24, three days up to a week, and 24 hours for anything longer. You approve or reject it, one hunter can ask once, and a dare can only ever be extended once.