Ethereum Bug Bounty Rewards Jump by 4x Ahead of Merge Upgrade

As Ethereum developers gear for the Merge upgrade next month, the Ethereum Foundation wants to make sure that there are no bugs that remain unaddressed. As a result, the Ethereum Foundation has literally quadrupled the bug bounty rewards for friendly hackers who would discover any important bugs in the Ethereum code.

So far, the bug bounty program was offering payments up to $250,000 along with a place on Ethereum’s leaderboard for uncovering critical errors. As per a Bloomberg report, the Ethereum Foundation has now increased these bug bounty rewards to more than $1 million. This announcement for the increase came on Wednesday, August 24.

As the Ethereum Merge event is just three weeks away, the raise in the bounty reward aims to reduce any critical issues arising at the last moment. Currently, the scheduled date for the Ethereum Merge is September 15. However, the exact date will vary based on the computing power supporting the network.

Just two days back, two execution layer clients Go Ethereum and Nethermind discovered some bugs in the mainnet updates. However, on Wednesday, August 24, Ethereum client Go Ethereum released Geth v1.10.23 fixing the bug as part of a stable Mainnet Merge update.

The Ethereum Merge

The Ethereum Merge event aims for a successful transition of the Ethereum blockchain from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain network. This has been the much-awaited upgrade for the Ethereum community as will it drastically improve network scalability and efficiency as well as reduce transaction costs.

The Ethereum Merge upgrade will happen in two different parts. The Bellatrix upgrade will happen on the Beacon Chain at 11:34 am UTC on September 6. While the Paris upgrade will happen on the execution layer on September 15.

The ETH price rallied all the way to $2,000 over the optimism surrounding the Merge upgrade. However, there’s been some price correction over the last week. Currently, ETH is trading at a price of $1,650 with a market cap of $203 billion. The recent ETH price movements have also been strongly correlated to S&P 500.