How Quests works, end to end.

01Overview

A quest is a task with a reward locked on-chain before anyone starts work. Anyone can post one. Anyone can complete one. The reward is paid in USDG, a dollar stablecoin, so the number on the board is the number that lands in your wallet.

Bounty boards fail for one reason: people do the work and do not get paid. Every design decision here follows from removing that risk. The money is escrowed before a quest is visible, the poster cannot claw it back, and if nobody wins, the contract returns it on a timer rather than at anyone's discretion.

02How it works

Three moves, and the money only travels on the last one.

03Posting a quest

• Connect a wallet, write the quest, set a reward pool of at least 5 USDG, choose the winner count, and pick a deadline between 24 hours and 30 days.
• Say what counts as done. Every requirement is a line item, and reviews are read literally against them. A vague brief is the single biggest cause of a quest that ends in an argument.
• Optionally attach a PONSv2 coin. The quest then shows that ticker on the board and appears on the coin's page. You do not have to be the coin's deployer, and most posters will not be, since PONS pays creators nothing. Holders promoting their own bag are the natural funders.
• Funding is one signature plus one transaction. USDG supports EIP-2612 permit, so there is no separate approve step.
• You cannot cancel or withdraw a live quest. If the deadline passes with no valid submission, escrow refunds the pool to you.

04Completing a quest

• Anyone with a wallet can submit. There is no application and no exclusivity, so a quest with 50 entries pays whoever actually met the brief.
• Proof is a public link, a file, or a transaction hash, whichever the quest asks for. Every quest generates a short code; for content quests your proof has to carry that code, so a screenshot of someone else's work does not pass.
• Three submissions per wallet per quest. There is no fee to submit, ever. Charging people to attempt work is how a board fills up with nothing.
• Submissions are append-only. You can post a numbered update, but the original stays visible, so nobody can be accused of changing their entry after a decision.
• Check the odds before you spend an evening on something. Every card shows the entry count and the reward per entry.

05Review and payout

The poster decides who wins. We only enforce the rules that are written down.

• The poster's pick is binding. Quests does not overrule taste, and does not substitute its own judgement for the creator's.
• We intervene in exactly two cases: a rule in section 08 was broken, or the published requirements plainly were not met. That is the whole of our discretion, and we would rather write it down than leave it open.
• 48 hour decision window. If the poster has not picked winners within 48 hours of the deadline, escrow awards the top-ranked valid submission automatically. Money does not sit in limbo because someone stopped logging in.
• Payout is pushed, not claimed. Winners receive USDG inside the approval transaction and never have to sign anything or hold gas to collect.
• Nothing valid by the deadline plus the window, and the pool refunds to the poster. The refund is permissionless: anyone can trigger it, and the funds can only go back to the original depositors.
• Settled quests stay on the board with the winner, the proof and the transaction visible. Nothing is quietly deleted.

06Rejections and appeals

• Every rejection carries a written reason from a fixed set of codes: requirement not met, proof not verifiable, not original work, rule breach, duplicate, or late.
• You have 72 hours to appeal, and an appeal gets a human answer. Appeals are free. There is no bond and nothing is slashed, because a bond prices out exactly the person who was wronged.
• Standing is limited to the entrants and the poster, one appeal each, so an appeal queue cannot be spammed.
• Spam and plagiarism get a strike. Three strikes and the wallet cannot submit again.

07Fees and the pool

One fee, charged once, on top of the reward. Post a 100 USDG quest and you pay 101 USDG; the winner is promised 100 and receives 100.

• No submission fees. Attempting a quest is free and always will be.
• No fee on the winner's side. The headline number is the number claimed.
• Fee parameters are snapshotted onto each quest at funding time, so changing them later never rewrites a live escrow.
• Anyone can boost a live pool by adding USDG to it. Boosts are tracked per depositor, and if the quest expires unclaimed each depositor is refunded their own share.

08What you cannot post

These are removed and the escrow refunded. They are written as named examples rather than vague categories, on purpose, because the vague version is what lets a board argue its way into listing them.

• Nothing irreversible to a body. No tattoos, piercings, brandings, shaving, ingesting anything, or permanent modification of any kind.
• Nothing physically dangerous. No heights, water, fire, vehicles, trespass, stunts, or extreme sport.
• Nothing that targets a person. No harassment, doxxing, pile-ons, or quests naming a private individual.
• Nothing illegal, and nothing that asks someone to break another platform's terms.
• No paying for price action. You cannot pay people to buy, hold, sell, or move the market cap of a coin. Pay for the work, not the trade.
• No pure chance. Quests are judged on delivered work, never on a raffle or a draw.
• No in-person quests routed to nearby strangers, and no location-precise tasks. This is why there is no "near me" tab and never will be.
• Nothing with a life-sized downside for a four-figure reward: no quitting a job, no dropping out.

09Network and USDG

Quests runs on Robinhood Chain, an Arbitrum Orbit L2 with roughly 0.1 second blocks. Rewards are denominated and settled in Global Dollar (USDG).

• USDG has 6 decimals. 250 USDG is 250000000 base units. Every money value in the app goes through one conversion pair so nothing is ever written against an 18-decimal assumption.
• USDG supports EIP-2612 permit, so funding a quest is a typed-data signature plus one transaction rather than approve-then-fund. A plain approve path stays as a fallback for wallets that refuse typed-data signing.
• Gas is ETH, not USDG. That is precisely why payouts are pushed inside the approval transaction: a winner paid in dollars who holds no ETH would otherwise be stranded in front of a claim button.
• USDG is an upgradeable proxy controlled by its issuer, which can pause the token globally or freeze an individual address. A frozen escrow could neither pay nor refund. We use SafeERC20 and state the risk rather than pretending it away.

10The escrow contract

Small on purpose. The less discretion the contract grants an operator, the less anyone has to trust us.

• fundQuest / fundQuestWithPermit — takes a metadata hash, the reward, the deadline and the winner cap, and pulls the pool plus fee into escrow.
• publish — platform-only, flips a screened draft live. Screening happens before money is committed.
• cancelUnpublished — refunds a draft immediately if it fails screening.
• boost — anyone adds to a live pool, recorded per depositor.
• approvePayout — takes the winner list and exact amounts, requires the amounts to sum to the escrowed total, and pushes USDG to each winner with SafeERC20 in that same transaction.
• refund — callable by anyone after the deadline plus the decision window, paying every depositor pro rata. Permissionless so it cannot be stalled.

Splitting without stranding dust

USDG has 6 decimals, so 500 USDG across three winners is 166.666666 each and leaves 2 base units locked forever if you divide on-chain. The contract never divides: the interface computes the split, assigns any remainder to the first winner, and the contract requires the amounts to sum to the escrowed total exactly.

11Attaching a PONSv2 coin

A quest can be tied to any coin launched through the PONS v2 factory, whatever it is paired against. Over a recent 100,000-block window launches split roughly 48% ETH, 34% tokenised NVDA and 5% USDG, with a long tail of other tokenised stocks, so restricting the board to USDG-paired coins would cut it off from most of the ecosystem.

• Bonding progress, not market cap. A PONS v2 coin opens around $3,236 fully diluted and graduates near $39,641. A dollar figure makes every coin on the board look dead, so the coin chip shows progress toward graduation instead, and a dollar cap only after it graduates.
• Coin data is read directly from the chain in one batched call. No indexer and no backend are needed for v1.
• The reward is always USDG, never the attached coin. A poster funding in a coin they control could take real work from a stranger and settle in supply they minted.
• Official coin quests are verified against the launch record's fee recipient, never against the deployer field, which names a router rather than a person.

12Sybil resistance

There is no identity layer on chain 4663 and a wallet is free, so anything that hands out money per-account is a target. Boards on other chains gate this behind a social login with a follower minimum; the chain-native version is cheaper to verify and harder to fake.

• Likes never decide money. A heart on a quest is a demand signal and a sort key, nothing more. It never weights a payout and never appears on a submission.
• Entering a quest can require the wallet to hold or to have traded the attached coin, which costs a sybil real money per identity.
• Minimum wallet age and prior on-chain activity are configurable thresholds, set separately for posting and for entering, read from config so they can be tuned without a redeploy.
• An X handle can be attached as a display claim, clearly labelled unverified, never as proof of anything.

13The $QUESTS token

$QUESTS is the board's own coin, launched through PONS v2 like any other. It is not required to post a quest, to enter one, or to get paid: rewards are USDG and that does not change.

14Build phases

Where this actually is, without rounding up.

15Open questions

Things we have not settled. Listed because a docs page that only contains decided things is a brochure.

• What $QUESTS does. See section 13.
• The launch reward cap. Somewhere around $500 per quest to start, lifting as review throughput proves out. Not fixed.
• Who countersigns. Today that is us. It should become a small multisig, and eventually should not be needed for uncontested payouts at all.
• Whether boosts are refundable to boosters when a quest expires, or roll into the poster's next quest. Currently specified as refundable per depositor.

16Risks

• Smart contract risk. The escrow will be audited, and an audit is not a guarantee. Do not fund a quest with money you cannot afford to lose.
• Token risk. USDG is an upgradeable proxy whose issuer can pause transfers or freeze addresses, including ours. A frozen escrow can neither pay nor refund.
• Counterparty risk. A poster can write a brief so tight that nobody satisfies it, and the pool refunds to them. Read the requirements before you spend time, and check the poster's record.
• Moderation risk. We screen drafts, and we will still get some wrong. Removed quests are logged publicly with the reason rather than disappearing.
• Settlement. A payout on an L2 shows as paid on soft confirmation. That is not the same as final on Ethereum, and the interface does not claim it is.
• No licence. Quests holds no financial services licence in any jurisdiction and nothing here is financial advice.

17Support

The fastest route is the X account. For an appeal, use the appeal link on the quest itself so the thread carries the submission with it.

Quests is built on PONS v2 and Robinhood Chain. It is not affiliated with Robinhood Markets, Inc.