The fifth stellar community fund ended with a bit of surprise and unexpected happening since the event first launched. It broke a lot of records, surprising records. The community fund was designed to allow the community members to transparently vote projects so they can be rewarded with some Stellar Lumens (XLM). The fifth round winners are Lettuce, Stellarmint, Free Voting Platform, OpenSolar, The Interstellar Platform, Stellar Update, Xlet, Cosmic vote, and Rigel.

Lettuce had 18% of the price pool with 545,454XLM at the top spot and Rigel had 4.35% of the price pool with 130,434XLM in the last position. The round broke records in terms of the number of votes recorded from the community and the number of votes disqualified. The final round had a whooping 4,137 votes and 4,058 votes were disqualified. Votes that were disqualified came from duplicate IPs, new accounts since the voting rounds began, with zero proofs, etc. Trybal.Network had to be disqualified because most of the disqualified votes were for the project. According to a release from Tyler van der Hoeven, Ecosystem Evangelist at Stellar.org, dissecting the matter:

“As we began our review, it became clear that the majority of disqualifications had a common project in their queue: Trybal.Network. IP dups, new accounts, and zero proofs were all painting a pretty unflattering picture. Once we started a deep dive into hundreds of Twitter, Github, and Reddit proofs, strong evidence became hard proof.”

It was concluded that the disqualified votes came from bounty hunters. From the past events and experience with Keybase airdrop abrupt end due to spammers on the network, it is obvious that the Stellar development Fund (SDF) have learnt their lesson and want nothing, whatsoever, to do with bounty hunters. SDF funded the Keybase airdrop with 2 million XLM but the event ended in the second month due to overwhelming spam registrations from bounty hunters, too much for the system to handle. The airdrop was supposed to last for about six months.

Trybal.Network seem to be an ideal home for bounty hunters since it was designed to reward everyone with tokens. The next step for Trybal.Network will have to be re-thought if they will find good favour with the Stellar Development Fund. For SDF, the occurrence is part of a learning curve which they will have to adapt and learn for future SCF events.