Developers who successfully identify vulnerabilities in the new Solana validator client, known as Firedancer, can earn up to $1 million in rewards from a bug bounty program.
Firedancer is high-performance validator client built for Solana by trading firm Jump Crypto and is written in the C++ programming language. The validator client has been in the works since 2022, with the goal of improving the network’s throughput, resilience, and efficiency.
Jump Crypto is offering up to $1 million in rewards through bug bounty and security services platform Immunefi. The program will be structured as a 42-day competitive audit that starts on July 10 and ends Aug. 21.
“Firedancer v0.1 will respond within 24 hours on weekdays to all bug reports,” said the Immunefi team, noting that technical questions can be addressed to the technical team via Immunefi’s Discord channel.
After the 42-day audit is complete, Immunefi will publish an event-specific leaderboard and bug reports from the event.
According to pseudonymous developer “@CantelopePeel,” the team is currently working on and testing the first versions of the Solana consensus and fork choice algorithms. The team has dubbed the first version of the validator “Frankendancer.”
“Millions of slots of execution have been tested and match the Solana protocol,” said CantelopePeel.
Firedancer has been a highly anticipated addition to Solana because of its potential to optimize the blockchain for onchain high-frequency trading. Firedancer is designed to support a greater number of concurrent transactions and includes support for sharding.
In an episode of The Scoop podcast, Jump Crypto’s former president Kanav Kariya said Solana’s high-performance design and Jump engineers’ experience in building efficient systems made Firedancer a good opportunity for the firm.
