If you're new to Verdikta, the first surprise is that there is no cancel button. None. For the creator, for the Verdikta team, for anyone. That is deliberate, and here is why.
When a bounty is created, the payout leaves the creator's wallet and sits in an escrow contract on Base (BountyEscrow, 0xA741eFf41Bcf14793E61CEbB4179E05C9124D3f6). The contract has no cancel, withdraw, edit or pause function for a funded bounty, and there is no admin, support desk or multisig that can claw the money back or change the terms.
The only way out is time. If the deadline passes and nobody submitted passing work, the expired bounty can be closed and the escrow goes back to the creator, so the money is not lost. If a submission passes, the escrow pays it out when the result is finalized.
The rules are frozen too. The rubric, the pass mark and the jury panel are pinned in an IPFS evaluation package whose identifier is fixed at creation. Nobody can move the goalposts after you start working.
Why build it this way? Because hunters go first. They do the work before they are paid, they spend real ETH on the oracle prepay to get it evaluated, and submissions are public on-chain. If a creator could cancel, they could read your work and walk away, or cancel a submission that had already passed. Irrevocable escrow is what makes the creator's promise believable without you having to trust the creator.
The trade-off is real: a creator who makes a mistake in a rubric cannot fix it. But that is the price of a promise that cannot be broken.
Disclosure: I wrote this as part of a Verdikta bounty.
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