Researchers submitting bug reports to Firedancer will have to permanently burn 1 SOL, worth about $100, in an attempt to reduce spam and ease the pressure on security teams reviewing AI-assisted work.
The new requirement follows a month-long audit competition that attracted 809 reports but identified only 127 unique security findings. Nearly half of the valid submissions duplicated reports that had already been filed.
AI is believed to have helped generate or write almost all of the entries, creating a significant increase in the amount of material researchers needed to assess. The 1 SOL charge is intended to discourage low-quality or repetitive submissions before they reach the review process.
The payment will not be returned to the researcher. Instead, the 1 SOL must be permanently burned for every report submitted to Firedancer.
The volume of reports in the latest competition highlights the difficulty of distinguishing genuine vulnerabilities from duplicated or AI-generated claims. Although the contest produced a number of valid findings, the gap between total submissions and unique issues means security teams were required to process a much larger body of work than the final number of discoveries suggested.
Jump Crypto is also temporarily increasing rewards for certain vulnerabilities. Critical flaws found in Solana’s Alpenglow voting system will be eligible for payments of up to $300,000.
The higher rewards are being offered alongside the new submission cost, creating a system that seeks to make serious, original findings more valuable while making mass or repetitive reporting more expensive.
The change applies to reports submitted to Firedancer, while the latest figures come from the recent audit competition. That contest generated 809 reports in total, with 127 separate security findings ultimately identified.
The evidence from the competition also showed that duplication remained a major issue: almost half of the valid reports repeated vulnerabilities that had already been submitted. With AI thought to have played a role in producing nearly all the reports, the new requirement is designed to ensure that researchers have a financial reason to assess a claim before sending it to security teams.
For researchers who uncover a critical problem in the Alpenglow voting system, the potential reward of up to $300,000 is substantially greater than the 1 SOL submission cost. However, reports that add no new information will still require the same permanent payment, regardless of whether they are accepted as unique findings.
