Ethereum Foundation: 1 Million Dollar Prize For Those Who Can Find Bugs On The Network

Ethereum is opening up bug bounty opportunities. (photo: doc. Unsplash)

JAKARTA – Bug hunters or commonly known as bug bounties get good news. The second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, Ethereum (ETH), through the Ethereum Foundation will provide a cash reward of 1 million US dollars (approximately Rp. 14.7 billion) to anyone who can find a bug.

This is one of the Ethereum Foundation's efforts to improve network security. Additionally, the ETH agency increased the bounty for bug bounties ahead of Ethereum's transition from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) model.

The cash bounty is four times more than the regular bounty for bugs with high potential for network security vulnerabilities. Later, those who managed to find the bug will get paid until 8 September.

Launching CryptoPotato, the Ethereum Foundation announced a new bounty program focused specifically on Ethereum 2.0 in October 2020. Then, the Ethereum Foundation increased the bounty ahead of the launch of Beacon Chain which is an early upgrade of Ethereum's PoS version.

According to the official Ethereum Foundation blog, the Bellatrix upgrade will start The Merge phase. It is scheduled to air on September 6. With The Merge, Ethereum is expected to fully transition to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism by next month.

The announcement of a bounty for bug hunters of great value comes after Peter Szilagy, one of the developers of Ethereum, informed that a vulnerability had been discovered in Geth 1.10.22. Fortunately, the bug was fixed the day before.

This August, the Ethereum blockchain split due to a bug that was finally discovered in the Geth software. If this is not addressed, it will likely become a major problem for the Ethereum network.

Previously, in May, crypto platform Wormhole had to pay a bounty of US$10 million to an anonymous white hat hacker for successfully discovering vulnerabilities in the system. Then there is another crypto platform, Aurora, which also gave a bounty of 6 million US dollars to hackers who found similar problems.

It doesn't stop there, crypto platforms are willing to spend millions of US dollars for locators of bugs that make the network vulnerable. As done by MakerDAO who is willing to disburse a bounty worth 10 million US dollars for the bug bounty program.