Solana Offers $1M Bug Bounty on Long-Awaited Firedancer Client

The Solana developer team has invited all blockchain developers to detect and report critical bugs on version 0.1 of Solana’s new validator client, Firedancer. Calling the bug bounty program the “Boost,” the team offers $1 million worth of USDC stablecoin to white hat hackers submitting significant bugs.

want to try to break Firedancer and get paid while doing it? 🔥💃

Up to $1M in bounties are up for grabs to better secure the in-development Solana validator client.https://t.co/mv9DO89qSL

— Solana Developers (@solana_devs) July 3, 2024

$1M Bug Bounty for Developers

Details about the bug bounty were shared via the website of Immunefi, a Web3 bug bounty platform and Solana’s partner for the Boost. The bounty program will commence on July 10th and end on August 21st. Developers must submit personal details for the Know Your Customer (KYC) assessment before qualifying to claim a portion of the $1 million reward.

Interested developers are welcome to join Immunefi’s Discord platform to communicate with the Firedancer technical team. Discussions will occur within the “firedancer-v0.1-boost” channel. On weekdays, the Firedancer team will respond to all bug reports within 24 hours of submission.

A few days after the program launch, Firedancer v0.1 will host a live technical walkthrough on Discord to guide all interested developers. At the end of the Boost, Immunefi will release “an event-specific leaderboard and bug reports from the event.”

Most crypto-based projects embrace bug bounty programs to downsize vulnerability to security attacks. Whitehat hackers who detect such bugs are compensated with funds based on the impact of the bug detected. In a previous report, a developer received $2 million for detecting two critical bugs on the Sei network.

What is Firedancer?

Firedancer is a Solana validator client developed by Jump Crypto. The project aims to make Solana’s transactions faster and cheaper and enable support for sharding. During its initial reveal in a 2022 live demo, the technical team showed that the validator client can perform up to 1.2 million transactions per second, a feat the Solana network has yet to achieve.

Firedancer’s live testnet was launched in October 2023. Since then, the project has served as Solana’s second validator client.