New Firedancer Bug Bounty Rule: Each Report Must Burn 1 SOL
Solana validator client Firedancer announced that security researchers must permanently burn 1 SOL (approximately $100) for each vulnerability report submitted, and the fee is non-refundable. Previously, its $1 million audit competition received 809 reports, nearly half of which were duplicates. Jump Crypto stated that almost all submissions involved AI agents, and pending reports once backed up to 299.
Event Timeline
- [10-27 07:54] Firedancer requires burning 1 SOL per vulnerability report submitted to curb AI spam reports (PANews)
- [10-27 07:55] Firedancer requires burning 1 SOL per vulnerability report to curb AI spam reports (Odaily 星球日报)
- [10-27 08:03] Firedancer vulnerability bounty new rule: each report requires burning 1 SOL to combat AI farming (吴说)
Background and Impact
According to CoinDesk, Firedancer, the Solana validator client developed by Jump Crypto, announced a new rule: security researchers must permanently burn 1 SOL, valued at approximately $100, for each vulnerability bounty report submitted. The fee is non-refundable, regardless of whether the report is invalid, outside the scope of rewards, or duplicate of other reports; reports without burned SOL are not eligible for awards. Three sources (PANews, Odaily 星球日报, 吴说) are consistent in their description of the rule.
The direct background for the new rule is the massive influx of AI-assisted reports. Previously, Firedancer held a one-month security audit competition with a $1 million prize pool, running from April 9 to May 9, which attracted 162 researchers who submitted 809 reports, producing 127 unique security findings, with nearly half of valid submissions being duplicate reports. Jump Crypto stated that almost all submissions involved AI agents in discovering vulnerabilities or writing reports, and the large volume of reports once caused pending reports to back up to 299. Meanwhile, according to PANews, Jump raised rewards: eligible findings can receive double the standard bounty before November 20, triple for specific Alpenglow vulnerabilities, and up to $300,000 for critical findings.
From a mechanism design perspective, the SOL burning threshold raises the submission cost from nearly zero to approximately $100, intended to filter out batch-generated low-quality reports through economic costs and alleviate manual review pressure; at the same time, the doubling of rewards increases the return on high-quality findings, forming a combination of "raising the threshold, raising the bounty." It should be noted that the requirement to burn 1 SOL also applies to invalid, duplicate, and out-of-scope reports, so researchers' trial-and-error costs increase accordingly. Users who hold SOL or wish to participate in related on-chain activities typically complete operations through exchange channels, such as the official entrances including Huobi HTX registration APP download, Gate.io registration APP download, Bitget registration APP download, Binance binance registration APP download, OKX registration APP download, etc. All three sources cite CoinDesk, with no substantive divergence in content.
FAQ
### How broad is the scope of the new rule?
According to existing reports, the rule targets the report submission process of the Firedancer vulnerability bounty program, requiring each report to permanently burn 1 SOL (approximately $100), and is non-refundable regardless of whether the report is invalid, duplicate, or outside the reward scope; reports without burned SOL are not eligible to receive rewards. The sources did not mention that the rule covers other Solana projects.
### What are the key upcoming dates?
According to PANews, Jump Crypto has raised rewards: eligible findings can receive double the standard bounty before November 20, triple for specific Alpenglow vulnerabilities, and up to $300,000 for critical findings. The sources did not disclose the effective date of the new rule or other scheduling beyond the audit competition.
### Will this event affect the SOL price?
The existing three sources only cover the rule itself and audit competition data, and do not provide any analysis or predictions regarding the impact on SOL price. The relationship between the per-transaction scale of burning 1 SOL and the overall circulating supply is also not given in the material, so it is not possible to assess the market impact based on this.