Researchers who want a reward for reporting a Solana bug must now burn 1 SOL per submission, about $100 at current prices, CoinDesk reports. The fee is permanent, non-refundable and applies even to invalid or duplicate reports.
The change comes from the Firedancer team, built by trading firm Jump Crypto, and the updated terms were published on Monday.
The reason is a $1 million audit contest that ran from 9 April to 9 May. It drew 809 reports from 162 researchers, but only 127 were unique security findings, and nearly half of the valid ones were duplicates.
Jump’s Ishan Bhatt wrote in a 16 October review that AI has made finding bugs cheap but judging them is still expensive. Jump believes AI helped with almost every submission, though that is a belief, not a measurement.
The backlog peaked at 299 open reports. Researchers also rediscovered bugs that had been reported but not yet fixed or disclosed, and about 80 percent of duplicates arrived more than three days after the original.
Among the serious flaws found was a scheduling error that could cause disagreement over transaction ordering. The report does not say whether that one has been fixed.
A $100 fee prices out the casual spammer but not a researcher with a real exploit. Whether it also deters honest reporters, or simply moves the flood elsewhere, will only show in the next contest. Until then the 809 reports stand as the only data point.
