The Cardano Foundation, an independent Swiss not-for-profit organization overseeing the advancement of Cardano ($ADA) and its ecosystem, has temporarily doubled the rewards offered in its bug bounty program in an effort to further boost the network’s security.
According to an update on HackerOne, bug bounty rewards have been doubled for a total of six weeks ending March 25, 2022, with the largest potential bounty being $20,000 for critical vulnerabilities affecting Cardano nodes.
Other vulnerabilities affecting nodes may grant white hath ackers rewards between $10,000 and $800. On the other hand, vulnerabilities affecting Cardano wallets, can offer rewards ranging from $500 to $15,000 for exploits deemed critical.
The Cardano Foundation has detailed that hackers must provide detailed reports with reproducible steps to be eligible for these rewards. In its update, the Foundation wrote that it “looks forward to working with the security community to find security vulnerabilities in order to keep our businesses and customers safe.”
The program, it added, aims to “strengthen the Cardano brand” while covering “essential items to access and manage crypto assets that are issued on the Cardano blockchain.”
As CryptoGlobe reported, the Cardano Foundation launched its bug bounty program for ethical hackers in September of last year with the hacker-powered security firm HackerOne to look for vulnerabilities in the project’s blockchain.
Bug bounty rewards are a popular way for organizations to invite ethical hackers in to work with them and get rewarded for helping make their products and services safer and have been growing in the cryptocurrency space. In 2018, cryptocurrency-related bug bounties netted hackers nearly $900,000. This year alone, a security researcher who fixed a critical vulnerability on Ethereum layer-two scaling solution was awarded a $2 million bounty.
The stakes for Cardano have also been growing along with its network. As reported, the number of addresses holding ADA has kept on rising in January to hit a new 4.53 million all-time high as monthly transactions on the cryptocurrency’s network also kept on growing.
These addresses have now conducted over 30 million transactions, while the number of smart contracts deployed on the network went over 1,000 for the first time this year.
Cardano developer Input Output has proposed increasing the network’s block size by 11% from 72 KB to 80 KB after network load surged above 90% with the launch of a popular DeFi platform SundaeSwap. Cardano’s network load peaked above 90% after SundawSwap’s launch while the total value locked on it jumped over 9,000%.
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