White hat hackers have earned $32,000 in bounties over the last two months by reporting security holes in crypto and blockchain projects, according to a report by Hard Fork on May 20.
This lump sum of over $30,000 was distributed by 15 firms from March 28 to May 16 and documented in 30 public bug reports, per the article.
The rewards for a single discovery can differ depending on how damaging the exploit is. Hardfork noted that most of the bounties awarded by blockchain-driven firm OmiseGo were around $100; EOS company Block.one and the blockchain startup Aeternity, however, issued $10,000 individual rewards over the course of these two months.
Tron reportedly paid $3,500 to a hacker who found a vulnerability that could have crashed its entire blockchain. A following disclosure about the vulnerability stated that an attacker could have filled up the available memory on a computer and perform a Distributed Denial of Service attack on Tron’s network by using malicious code in smart contracts.
Major crypto exchange Binance also offers up to $10,000 per project for “P1: Critical” fixes, with a maximum reward of $100,000 in Binance Coin (BNB) per user. Binance classifies P1 in accordance with the Bugcrowd’s Vulnerability Rating Taxonomy.
As previously reported by Cointelegraph, white hat hackers earned $878,000 bounties for finding crypto bugs in 2018. Within that sum, major crypto exchange Coinbase reportedly spent $290,381, while Tron paid $76,200.