Ethereum developers announce $2 million ‘Attackathon’ ahead of Pectra hard fork

The Ethereum Protocol Security (EPS) team has announced a $2 million attackathon. The event looks to enhance the security of the Ethereum protocol by offering security researchers a bounty to spot vulnerabilities.

The attackathon is set to become the largest “crowdsourced security audit” for the Ethereum blockchain’s codebase. Spanning four weeks, the event will be open to the entire Ethereum community.

Community backed audit

According to the EPS Foundation, over $2 million would be raised for the reward pool. $500,000 has already been injected by the foundation. 

The foundation has also reached out to sponsors to raise the remainder by August 1.

Prominent bug bounty platform Immunefi will host the event. Participants would have to “follow specific rules set for the competition.” Only reports that are “impactful and rule-compliant” would qualify for the reward.

Immunefi is in charge of evaluating, compiling and publicising detailed reports of vulnerabilities discovered during the event.

The EPS foundation considers the bug bounty platform the perfect fit for this task due to its “experience in web3 security,” and a track record for managing large communities of security researchers.

The crowdsourced bug bounty program comes in a bid to prepare for the upcoming “Pectra” hard fork for the Ethereum blockchain.  The update is expected to go live by the end of 2024.

Both Prague” and “Electra” upgrades are included in Pectra. The fork will introduce upgrades to the execution layer, which is responsible for enforcing protocol rules, along with enhancements to the consensus layer.

Another key feature to be introduced is the “social recovery” feature. EIP-3074, included in the hardfork, will add smart contract features to Ethereum wallets. 

As such, users will be able to retrieve their assets if they lose or forget their seed phrase.

The EPS foundation noted that it’s looking to host similar events before every hard fork, adding:

These events will be organised on different platforms, providing varied opportunities for the community to engage in securing the Ethereum protocol.

Bug bounty programs have long been leveraged in the cryptocurrency space to weed out vulnerabilities.

As previously reported by Invezz, Solana developer Jump Crypto announced a $1 million bug bounty program on July 8. The event will reward participants for spotting vulnerabilities in Firedance, an upcoming third-party validator client for the network. 

The event will also be organised on Immunefi. To date, Immunefi has executed several such programs. The biggest bounty offered was from the cross-chain messaging protocol LayerZero for $15 million.

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