Solana has introduced a new measure to combat the influx of spam reports flooding its security teams. Starting this week, researchers submitting bug reports through the Firedancer program must burn 1 SOL, currently valued at around $100, to deter frivolous submissions. This move comes after a recent audit contest revealed that nearly half of the valid reports were duplicates, overwhelming the engineering team.
The audit contest, which concluded earlier this month, received 809 reports from 162 researchers but identified only 127 unique security issues. Jump Crypto, the developer behind Firedancer, attributed the surge in submissions to AI tools, which made it easier to generate reports but did not reduce the manual effort required to verify them. The new policy requires burning SOL tokens, which are permanently removed from circulation, even if the report is deemed invalid or duplicative.
Jump Crypto has also temporarily increased rewards for identifying critical vulnerabilities in Solana's Alpenglow voting platform, offering up to $300,000 for qualifying findings. The company hopes these changes will streamline the bug-reporting process and allow engineers to focus on genuine security threats. The Firedancer software, developed as an alternative to Solana's existing Agave software, is designed to enhance transaction processing and validation.
The backlog of unprocessed reports had reached a peak of 299, with many duplicates submitted days after the initial reports. Jump Crypto believes the new fee structure will discourage speculative submissions and free up resources for more critical security work.