Bug Bounty Rewards For “Stargate” Doubled By A Wiser Cosmos

As Cosmos (ATOM) is slowly leading up to its next major network upgrade, Stargate, it announced a bug bounty campaign with double the rewards. This campaign will last three months, and aims to improve the robustness of the software before its inevitable release.

Doubling Down On The Bug Bounties

The Stargate upgrade will see Cosmos complete the original roadmap it had laid down in its whitepaper, and stands to include the first implementation of the IBC protocol. IBC will allow Cosmos to connect to various other blockchain networks, increasing its use cases.

Zaki Manian, one of the early contributors, explained that the Stargate testnet is fully geared to launch. Even so, various teams of Cosmos are very keen to see further testing to the upgrade, in order to help identify critical bugs and exploits that may have slipped past the integration and engineering process.

Learning Lessons From The Past

Through doing so, the team is eager to try and avoid repeating the previous two incidents occurring this past year, where critical components were discovered to hold formidable bug. Back in July of this year, Tendermint’s consensus algorithm had a critical vulnerability discovered within it, which was promptly identified by Bluzelle, the blockchain firm. All the way back in October of 2019, a high-severity security vulnerability was discovered by the Cosmos team itself.

The bug bounty, starting today and ending on the 31st December, 2020, has no maximum program reward. What this means, is there’s no set cap on the amount of money a single bug can be worth, and there’s no limit to the amount of bugs one can report.

As stipulated, a minimum of $5,000 will be given for any identified critical bugs, which stands as twice as much as the last series of bug bounties. Alongside this, high, medium, and low-risk bugs will have their rewards increased, as well.

Originally, they were valued at $1,000, $500, and $100, respectively, but have now been increased to $3,000, $1,000, and $200, respectively.

Maintaining Its Open-Source Philosophy

Tess Rinearson stands as the Vice President of Engineering at Interchan GmbH, a Cosmos development firm. Rinearson gave comment about the matter, explaining that the process of proactively identifying and patching bugs stands as a critical part of any blockchain protocol to make it strong and resilient.

Alongside this, Rinearson gave comment about the release of the Stargate codebase, claiming that it renews the commitment from the firm to maintain an open-source community. Rinearson reaffirmed its goal of bringing Cosmos into a new era, as well.