Jump Crypto offers Solana devs up to $1m in Firedancer bug bounty program

Jump Crypto, a blockchain infrastructure company, has unveiled a new bug bounty program that will offer Solana developers up to $1 million to uncover vulnerabilities in the upcoming Firedancer, a third-party Solana validator client.

The bug bounty campaign, sponsored by Immunefi, will last 42 days, from July 10 to August 21, 2024, according to the platform’s recent blog post.

Firedancer is a breakthrough enhancement to the Solana blockchain infrastructure. During a live demonstration in 2022, Firedancer demonstrated its potential to handle over 1 million transactions per second.

Firedancer, which was designed from the ground up, adds an important layer of client diversity to the Solana ecosystem. Unlike the majority of current clients, which are primarily derivatives of Solana’s native implementation, Firedancer’s independent codebase substantially reduces the risks associated with supply chain attacks and common vulnerabilities that are inherent to uniform systems.

It is expected to surpass “QUIC,” a data transfer protocol developed by Google that has struggled to handle transaction processing during network spikes.

Cantelope Peel, a pseudonymous engineer at Jump Crypto, a significant blockchain infrastructure company, is leading the development of Firedancer v0.1.

Peel announced the bug bounty program on July 3, revealing that the team is now testing the Solana consensus and fork decision algorithms, as well as other critical components like live voting.

Firedancer is built with a dual-language base of C and Rust that are specifically suited to handle huge trade volumes.

Solana Labs co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko has previously stressed Firedancer’s capacity to improve the speed of the Solana network, hence increasing its scalability.

To participate in the bounty program, participants must go through the registration process, which includes giving know-your-client data.

Bugs identified in Firedancer v0.1 will be investigated and addressed within 24 hours on weekdays, according to Immunefi, the platform that hosts the bug bounty program.

Immunefi intends to provide an event-specific leaderboard as well as bugs reports once the program is completed.

Firedancer was initially deployed on a Solana testnet in November 2023, suggesting that Cantelope Peel and Jump Crypto have been developing the Solana validator client since January 30, 2023.

Peel earlier proposed creating an identical version of Firedancer on Ethereum, but no major work has been done thus far.

Meanwhile, on May 7, asset management firm Franklin Templeton praised the validator client, citing Solana’s growing potential to cement its position as the market’s third-largest cryptocurrency.