Bug Bounty payments for identifying Ethereum’s “critical bugs” have been increased fourfold ahead of The Merge with Beacon Chain and the transition to PoS.
The Ethereum Foundation’s protocol support team announced on its blog that all network vulnerability detection rewards related to The Merge will be quadrupled. The Foundation is ready to pay up to $1 million for detecting “critical bugs.”
According to the Ethereum Foundation’s blog, from August 24 to September 8, under the Bug Bounty program, the organization is ready to pay:
- up to $8,000 for low-risk bugs;
- up to $40,000 for medium-risk bugs;
- up to $200,000 for high-risk bugs;
- up to $1 million for critical bugs.
Earlier this month, the developers successfully merged the Goerli testnet with Beacon Chain, the last step in Ethereum’s transition to the Proof-of-Stake algorithm. The next move is to merge Ethereum with Beacon Chain via the Bellatrix hard fork, which is scheduled for September 6. The network’s final transition to PoS is planned for between September 10 and 20.
Bounties for so-called “white hats” may have been increased due to a recently discovered bug. For example, Péter Szilágyi, Software Developer at Ethereum, said recently that he discovered a regression in the Geth v1.10.22 protocol while testing the network’s readiness for The Merge that resulted in a corrupted state. The team responded quickly to the problem and released Geth v1.10.23 a day later to fix the bug.
Despite criticism voiced by Twitter experts, the change in Ethereum’s consensus mechanism evokes enthusiasm in the community, which supports the development team in every way possible. So, recently issuers of the largest stablecoins USDT and USDC supported Ethereum, and forecasts made by experts regarding the short-term outlook of ETH are quite positive.
