@Neo, this is a good and valid question.
Short: yes
What I did was asking around to some of my crypto friends and pitched the idea about a public testing-challenge. As we sucessfully did already a NODE-challenge this year.
But this time, the focus on the challenge is not securing the grin-network with more nodes, its its finding problems and bugs in Grin-Software.
To give you a little background information, why we did this: While we where building the Grinnode.live infrastructure we came across some problems and issues related to GRIN. Therefore we reported it every time to the developers. But we are only a small team of people working on the Grinnode.live infrastructure. I thought if more people would look at GRIN software, even for a short period of time, it would multiply the eyes looking at GRIN software. Therefore we might find more bugs or functional problems, prior to the last hard coded hard fork in January 2021.
Our funding is publicly verifiable:
As for the GRINs funds I might upload a payment proof. (<-- this is one test-case check them out on Keybase 
)
Signature: H1NO2+/7Y71vUU9JKnwXNVHu+7dQsHjAVUXZ/bilp/dUJIaETymuhulrksCPmtvYq6dZAQ6LCdhbvgI0wgZYc1A=
address: 3NYv5FZVHqYNvdSAUzTotfxmTaRaV8ugPw
message: https://forum.grin.mw/t/grinnode-live-winter-2020-bug-bash-challenge-and-free-grin-btc-prizes-giveaway/8060/
(no spaces for message, only the link)
Electrum wallet version 4.0.7 used to generate it.