Firedancer bug bounty now burns 1 SOL with every report

Researchers must now burn 1 SOL, about $101 at Tuesday’s price, with every Firedancer vulnerability report they file.

The Firedancer bug bounty now asks security researchers to burn 1 SOL for each vulnerability report they file. Firedancer is the independent Solana ($SOL) validator client built by trading firm Jump Crypto.

The quick take

Price: $SOL traded at $100.70, down 0.8% in 24 hours (CoinGecko, 12:44 UTC).
Trigger: Firedancer’s updated bounty terms make a 1 SOL burn a condition of every report.
Watch: Whether the doubled payouts that end on November 20 keep reports coming.

What happened

The burn sends the token to an incinerator address, so it leaves circulation for good. Jump Crypto does not collect it as revenue, CryptoSlate reported. A report filed without the burn cannot win a reward.

The cost is not refunded when a report turns out to be invalid, out of scope or a duplicate, CoinDesk reported on Tuesday. The new submission form also caps each main section at 3,000 characters.

Why it moved

Jump Crypto’s own review of a spring audit contest explains the change. The contest ran from April 9 to May 9 and drew 809 submissions from 162 researchers, which produced 127 unique security findings. Nearly half of the valid submissions were duplicates, and the backlog of open reports peaked at 299.

“AI has made finding bugs cheap, but judging them is still expensive,” Ishan Bhatt of Jump Crypto wrote in an October 16 review, CoinDesk reported. About 80% of the duplicate reports arrived more than three days after the first one. The token itself barely reacted, slipping 0.8% over 24 hours while Solana’s DeFi deposits stood at $5.7 billion, according to DefiLlama.

What to watch next

Eligible payouts are doubled through November 20, and findings in the new Alpenglow consensus code pay triple, with up to $300,000 for a critical one, CoinDesk reported. Researchers should expect first contact through a GitHub security advisory within 96 hours of a report, CryptoSlate reported.

The two outlets date the change differently: CryptoSlate says the terms took effect on October 18, while CoinDesk describes them as updated on Monday.

Bottom line: A 1 SOL fee puts a price on every report, and the reward boost running to November 20 will show whether researchers keep filing.