While the price of ethereum (ETH) is still down almost 60% from its all-time high, a foundation overseeing development of the namesake blockchain has increased the maximum payout of its bug bounty program fourfold to up to $1 million.

To qualify, you need to find a critical protocol, client, or language compiler bug affecting the Ethereum network. Less serious bugs can be rewarded with up to $50,000.

Among other things, a critical bug is defined as affecting more than 50% of the validators on the network, allowing the creation of an infinite amount of ETH, stealing ETH from wallets, or taking down the entire network by sending a single malicious on-chain transaction that ends up crashing all clients.

Besides the monetary reward, paid in ETH or the DAI stablecoin, bounty hunters are also awarded points that help rank the most active security researchers in Ethereum leaderboards.

For example, finding a critical bug would earn you up to 25,000 points. There are two of them: the Execution Layer Bug Bounty leaderboard and the Consensus Layer Bug Bounty leaderboard.

In the former, the top three bounty hunters – Martin Holst Swende, Guido Vranken, and Sam Sun – earned 35,000 and 64,500 points.

Meanwhile, in the Consensus Layer Bug Bounty leaderboard, protolambda, Quant Thoi Minh Nguyen, and Jonny Rhea were awarded between 18,700 and 42,400 points, alongside a financial reward.

The financial reward is granted to bounty hunters who are not employees or contractors of the Ethereum Foundation, Ethereum Foundation grantees, or client teams in scope of the bounty program.

The Ethereum Foundation has recently increased its efforts in securing the network. For example, during the Trillion Dollar Security Day this past February, developers identified key security issues and next steps that are needed to tackle them.

This includes issues such as quantum computing-related risks, cloud dependence, blind transaction signing, operational security failures, smart contract audit problems, speed-focused UX, frontend hacks, misaligned incentives, and more.

Now, the Trillion Dollar Security initiative is driven by Fredrik Svantes, a protocol security lead at the Ethereum Foundation, and Josh Stark from the foundation’s management team. The project aims to map the landscape of security strengths and attack vectors across Ethereum’s technology stack, implement near-term high-priority fixes, and allocate investments for longer-term improvement projects.

As reported by Cybernews last year, the Ethereum Foundation offered a $2 million prize fund for identified issues in the codebase.

---

Unlock more exclusive Cybernews content on YouTube.