Solana Firedancer Bug Bounty Now Charges 1 SOL Per Report to Stop AI Spam

Anyone who wants to report a flaw in Firedancer, the Solana validator client built by Jump Crypto, now has to burn 1 SOL first, roughly $100. The terms were updated Monday. Burned tokens leave circulation for good, the fee is never returned, and a report filed without a burn cannot earn a reward, even if it turns out to be a duplicate or out of scope.

Why AI Generated Bug Reports Overwhelmed Security Teams

The change follows a $1 million audit contest that ran from April 9 to May 9. It drew 809 reports from 162 researchers, yet only 127 were unique security findings. Jump believes AI agents helped find or write almost all of them. Finding bugs has become cheap, but proving them is slow, since engineers must reproduce each issue and test whether the attack really works. Some reports missed defenses elsewhere in the code. The queue peaked at 299 open reports, and about 80% of duplicates arrived more than three days after the first submission.

New Submission Limits

The contest already charged $100 per entry and allowed one report a day. The new platform also caps each main section at 3,000 characters.

Bigger Rewards for Valid Findings

Jump is paying more to offset the cost. Eligible bugs earn double through November 20, and Alpenglow bugs, tied to Solana’s new voting system, earn triple. Critical Alpenglow findings can reach $300,000. One serious contest discovery was a scheduling error that could make Firedancer run transactions out of order and disagree with other validators.