Firedancer now charges 1 SOL per bug report to stop AI spam

The team behind Firedancer, the Solana validator client built by Jump Crypto, now asks security researchers to burn 1 SOL, about $100, for every bug report they file. The burn is permanent and non-refundable, even when a report turns out to be invalid, out of scope or a duplicate, under terms updated on Monday, CoinDesk reports. Reports filed without a burn are not eligible for rewards.

Why Jump did it

• A $1 million audit competition between April 9 and May 9 drew 809 reports from 162 researchers.
• Those boiled down to 127 unique findings; nearly half of the valid submissions were duplicates.
• Jump believes AI agents helped find or write almost every submission. The review backlog peaked at 299 open reports, and about 80% of duplicates arrived more than three days after the original.

The contest already charged $100 per submission and capped researchers at one report a day. The new platform also limits each main report section to 3,000 characters. To keep good researchers interested, Jump is paying double rewards until Nov. 20, and triple for bugs in Alpenglow, Solana's new voting system, where critical findings can earn up to $300,000.

Our take

This is a sensible fix to a problem every bug bounty will soon have. Generating a plausible-looking vulnerability report now costs almost nothing; checking it still takes an engineer hours. A small, burned fee prices out mass speculative submissions without stopping anyone with a real exploit, since a valid critical bug pays thousands of times more.

The risk is at the edges: newcomers and researchers in lower-income countries may find $100 a real barrier, and some honest reports will lose money on duplicates. Pairing the fee with higher payouts softens that. The timing matters too. Alpenglow only went live on Oct. 21, and Firedancer exists so that one bug in one client cannot take down the whole network. Background on the switch is in our preview of the upgrade. Faster, less noisy triage is a security feature in itself.