Solana’s Firedancer Now Charges 1 SOL Per Bug Report

Solana’s Firedancer team now requires researchers to burn 1 SOL per bug report to combat AI-generated submissions flooding its security program.

• Firedancer, the Solana validator client built by Jump Crypto, now requires researchers to burn 1 SOL (about $100) per bug report.
• The fee is nonrefundable, even for invalid, out-of-scope or duplicate reports.
• A recent audit contest drew 809 reports but produced only 127 unique security findings, and Jump believes AI helped create nearly all of them.
• Jump is temporarily boosting rewards, with critical Alpenglow flaws eligible for up to $300,000.

The team behind Solana’s Firedancer software has introduced a paywall for bug hunters. Researchers must now burn 1 SOL, roughly $100, with every submission. The goal is to cut down on AI-generated spam and give engineers more time to investigate real security flaws.

Under terms updated on Monday, the burned tokens are permanently removed from circulation. The cost is nonrefundable whether a report turns out to be invalid, outside the program’s scope, or a duplicate. Reports submitted without a burn are not eligible for rewards.

Jump Crypto built Firedancer as an alternative to Agave, the main software validators use to check and process Solana transactions. A serious bug in this software can stop validators from processing payments or cause them to disagree about account balances. That could disrupt trades and transfers across the network. Every hour spent sorting through duplicate or unworkable reports is an hour not spent fixing vulnerabilities like these.

The decision follows a $1 million audit competition that ran from April 9 to May 9. It attracted 809 reports from 162 researchers, yet produced only 127 unique security findings once non-exploitable observations were excluded. Nearly half of the valid submissions were duplicates.

Jump believes AI agents helped find or write almost every submission. In an Oct. 16 review, Jump’s Ishan Bhatt argued that AI has made finding bugs cheap while judging them remains expensive. Engineers still had to reproduce each problem and check whether the proposed attack could actually work. Some reports flagged apparent weaknesses while overlooking protections elsewhere in the code.

The review backlog peaked at 299 open reports. As checks slowed, other researchers rediscovered bugs that had been submitted but not yet fixed or disclosed. About 80% of duplicates arrived more than three days after the original report.

The contest had already charged $100 per submission and capped researchers at one report a day. Jump says charging a fee discourages people from sending large volumes of speculative findings. The new platform also limits each main report section to 3,000 characters.

Alongside the new fee, Jump is raising payouts. Eligible findings receive double the standard reward through Nov. 20, and triple for bugs specific to Alpenglow, Solana’s new voting system. Critical Alpenglow findings can qualify for up to $300,000.

The move shows how AI is changing security work in crypto. Automated tools can generate reports faster than humans can review them, so teams are now using economic costs to filter the noise.

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