April 20th, 2021 at 5:35 pm UTC · 2 min read
Balancer Labs, the foundation that contributes to Balancer Protocol, a protocol for automated portfolio management and providing liquidity, announced that it will be launching the largest bug bounty in history, for a 1,000 ETH or $2 Million top prize. Balancer Labs, who today offered Balancer V2 for developers, hopes the prize will incentivize ethical hackers to discover vulnerabilities in the Balancer V2 Vault architecture.
Balancer Labs CEO Fernando Martinelli said:
“We are expanding the Balancer bug bounty program and greatly increasing reward amounts. Apart from being the largest on record, our bug bounty is innovative in that it scales as ETH goes up, in correlation with the broad crypto market and likely with the total value locked in Balancer protocol. The more there is at stake, the higher we believe our bug bounty rewards should be. The bug bounty program empowers everyone in the developer community to help us build a better Balancer. “
Bug bounties have increasingly become an avenue for developers to earn real cash. BBC News reported that nine hackers became millionaires off of bug bounties in 2020 alone. For Balancer V2, hackers have the option to claim up to $2,000,000 in USD, USDC; or 1,000 ETH for discoveries like draining significant funds from the Vault, permanently locking significant funds in the Vault or severe rounding errors where an attacker can steal funds in excess of any gas costs or swap fees.
Developers can leverage Balancer V2 as a building block to innovate freely and create new treasury management systems. A perfect example is smart pools, which can be programmed to have properties that change according to predetermined rules. This opens up the possibilities for dynamic fees that adapt to volatility or even liquidity bootstrapping pools (LBPs) which are excellent for distributing a new token, and so much more.
Learn more about how to participate in the bug bounty here.
Balancer Protocol allows for automated portfolio management and providing liquidity turning the concept of an index fund on its head: instead of paying fees to portfolio managers, you collect fees from traders who rebalance your portfolio by following arbitrage opportunities. Developers leverage Balancer as a permissionless building block to innovate freely and create new treasury management systems. Balancer Lab’s mission is to become the primary source of DeFi liquidity by providing the most flexible and powerful platform for asset management and decentralized exchange.