Elite Dangerous (by frontier) does community challenges . If for instance they set a challenge of transport 10M widgets. There would be a community reward for meeting that goal ( a system may change state or may not) there would then be individual rewards that were scaled so if you delivered 200K as part of the goal you got a bronze prize, 300k a silver and 1M a Gold. Which may have been varying amounts of ingame credits or special ship markers etc
Don't see why they wouldn't do the same thing
for instance - Community challenge: develop Artificial Insemination for Giant pandas community task raise 40Million research points. Gold 1 Million Research point Panda enhanced food Silver access 300000 research points access to panda swing 200000 Research points - reduce price on Pandas from 30000 CC to 10000CC for 20 real days
Could be a theoretical Community Challenge for Pandas based on research
I'm pretty sure the rewards will be rare/special animals. There's a third animal section in the storage spaces called "rewards", and I suppose that's where the animals you win will go. Maybe for both community challenges and normal challenges.