As Ethereum prepares for Altair upgrade, ‘bug-bounty program’ to reward users

Ethereum has remained focused on the development of its network, irrespective of what was happening in the spot market. Just a few days back the team announced the launch of Altair upgrade, also described as the first mainnet upgrade to the Beacon Chain. The upgrade is scheduled to take place at epoch 74240 or close to 27th October.

To inform the community and make them well-versed with the upcoming changes to Ethereum with the Altair upgrade, the team has given way to an interesting game, not competition.

The bug bounty program that enabled anyone to earn rewards for finding vulnerabilities has been switched to “ETH2 bug bounties.” Additionally, the community members finding the bugs will receive doubled bounties until the upgrade.

The team noted in a blog,

“The clients will run the beacon chain once the upgrade has been deployed. Clients will need to follow the logic set out in the specification and be secure against potential attacks. The bugs we want to find are related to the implementation of the protocol.”

It added that at the moment, Lighthouse, Nimbus, Teku, and Prysm bugs were eligible for this bounty. However, there were levels of bugs and rewards for users to consider. The low-impact bugs will earn a user nearly $2,000 while critical bug hunters will receive close to $50,000. However, the team wanted everyone to know it was a game and not a competition.

They added,

“The bug bounty program is an experimental and discretionary rewards program for our active Ethereum community to encourage and reward those who are helping to improve the platform. It is not a competition. You should know that we can cancel the program at any time, and awards are at the sole discretion of Ethereum Foundation bug bounty panel. “

As Altair inched closer by the day, the team needed to find and fix any existing bugs for a smooth rollout. The upgrade will bring support to the core consensus, clean up beacon state incentive accounting, while also fixing issues with validators incentives.

EIP-2982 introduced “punitive parameters” to ensure the economical security of the PoS protocol. The Altair upgrade will step up these parameters and the proposed penalties include “Inactivity leak” and “slashing.”

As the Ethereum network prepared for the upgrade, Ether witnessed nearly 13% growth over the past week. The digital asset was changing hands at $3,421, at the time of press.

Source: https://ambcrypto.com/ethereum-bug-bounty-hunters-will-be-paid-double-heres-why/