$1M bug bounty for Solana Firedancer client goes live this week

Solana developers will soon have a chance to earn as much as $1 million by finding bugs in the upcoming “Firedancer” independent validator client starting Wednesday.

The bug bounty program, the first of its kind for Firedancer, is being offered by Jump Crypto and will be powered by bug bounty platform Immunefi — running 42 days from July 10 to Aug. 21, 2024.

Participants will be able to tap into a $1 million rewards pool with the maximum payout for a single bounty at $1 million, paid in USD Coin ( USDC ).

Firedancer is a new validator client that is expected to improve Solana’s network performance. As an independent client validator, Firedancer would play a crucial role in processing transactions and building blocks in Solana’s $60 billion network.

Firedancer has been touted as a superior solution to “QUIC” — a Google-developed data transfer protocol that has a history of failing to process transactions when Solana experiences surges in network activity.

Development of Firedancer v.0.1 has been led by pseudonymous engineer Cantelope Peel of blockchain infrastructure firm Jump Crypto, the same person who announced the bounty program on July 3.

Peel said the team is still working on — and actively testing — its first versions of the Solana consensus and fork choice algorithms.

“We are also working on live voting and various other little bits around that,” Peel added.

Firedancer is implemented in the C and C++ software languages which aim to accommodate high trading volumes.

Solana Labs co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko previously said Firedancer can increase the speed of the Solana network.

Details of the bounty program

Those wishing to participate in the bounty will need to fill out know-your-client details as part of the registration process.

Bugs found on Firedancer v0.1 will be investigated and responded to within 24 hours on weekdays, Immunefi noted.

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Immunefi said it will publish an event-specific leaderboard and bug reports shortly after the bounty program ends.

Firedancer first went live on a Solana testnet in November 2023. Firedancer’s GitHub account suggests Peel and Jump Crypto have been working on the Solana validator client since Jan. 30, 2023.

Peel proposed implementing a similar version of Firedancer on Ethereum back in March; however, no substantial developments have resulted from that since.

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