Solana's Alpenglow Bug Hunt Charges Researchers 0.5 SOL Fee

The Solana Foundation's Alpenglow bug hunt has implemented a unique fee structure to encourage security researchers to report flaws in its new consensus protocol. Researchers are charged a non-refundable 0.5 SOL to file each finding before the competition closes on August 19 at 16:00 UTC.

The rules require every finding to pass through a designated portal, which burns the fee and creates one confidential GitHub Security Advisory. Reports sent through another channel are ineligible.

Researchers pay the filing cost before Anza determines validity, severity, duplication or reward. They also work against a moving version of Agave master, with each report must identifying the commit where the flaw appeared, reproducing the issue there and arriving while the bug remains unfixed on master.