Polygon (MATIC) Announces $2 Million Bug Bounty to Make DeFi Safer

Amid the slew of recent attacks on DeFi platforms over the past several weeks, Polygon has announced a $2 million bug bounty program to make its ecosystem safer. With this program, the popular Level-2 Ethereum scaling solution intends to identify and eliminate potential security flaws before they are exploited and cause loss to projects and users on its ecosystem.

Since the beginning of 2021, the DeFi space has seen explosive growth, both in terms of adoption among users as well as among developers launching new projects in keeping with the soaring demand. However, it has also gone on to become a highly lucrative target for cybercriminals as a result.

The biggest hack the crypto sector has seen till date, when over $600 million was stolen from cross-chain DeFi protocol Poly Network, caused a loss of $85 million from the Polygon network as well. While this was a far smaller loss compared to those suffered by the project on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chains, the hack served to highlight security concerns on Polygon’s ecosystem, hurting its reputation at a time when it was poised for stellar growth in the DeFi space, owing to its scalability.

Polygon’s bug bounty program is already live on Immunefi and aims to improve the security of smart contracts and dApps running on its ecosystem. The Immunefi Vulnerability Classification System will allow its team to leverage a threat classification system based on the level of vulnerability to its network being discovered by white hat hackers.

White hat hackers can make $1,000 for low-level threats on the network which can go up to $2 million for critical threats. Meanwhile, vulnerabilities discovered on dApps can fetch them anywhere between $2,500 and $15,000 in rewards. The payments will be issued in cryptocurrencies – Polygon (MATIC), Ethereum (ETH) or a stablecoin.

Commenting on the release of the bug bounty program, Polygon Co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, notes, “User security is at the forefront of Polygon’s ethos. This substantial bounty offering aims to solidify what we know to be an extremely secure network.” Polygon is among the few leading blockchain networks that have emerged successfully from a smart contract audit conducted by leading cybersecurity firm Certik.