ApeCoin DAO to launch 1 million $APE bug bounty program, community votes on the idea
With the launch ApeCoin’s staking system drawing closer, a member of the ApeCoin DAO has proposed a 1 million $APE bug bounty program to incentivize white hat hackers to find potentially costly bugs with the staking program.
Maaria Bajwa, who is a Special Council member for the Ape Foundation, submitted a draft AIP earlier this month, requesting that treasury assets be used to fund the $1 million $APE (about $4.5 million based on a 30-day average $APE price) bug bounty program in collaboration with Immunefi and Llama.
Last Thursday I submitted a draft AIP to fund a $1M bug bounty program for the staking contract which is set to go live in a few weeks.
— maaria.eth (@maariabajwa) October 18, 2022
My original idea was to fund an ongoing bug bounty program but in the interest of time I decided to narrow the scope to just AIP-21
Bajwa argues that given the spate of hacks in the crypto sector it is prudent to employ bounty programs as an additional layer of security to identify bugs and keep users safe. Notably, the smart contract for AIP-21 is already live on testnet, and rewards will soon start to roll in.
AIP-134: Bug Bounty Program for AIP-21” is supposed to go into effect before staking rewards begin to accrue with AIP-21. If upheld, the bounty program is expected to delay staking rewards by roughly three weeks, shifting the new goal post to December 7 instead of November 14.
While the initial focus is on AIP-21, the bug bounty program will be funded as long as staking is live, allowing the DAO to address “new vulnerabilities as they are discovered.”
As per the proposal, bug bounty platform Immuefi and protocol engineering/treasury management DAO Llama will sign a grant agreement with the Ape Foundation once the proposal is approved.
As for the proposal’s timeline, members of the community have until November 3 to either support or reject the idea. After that, Llama and Immunefi will have about seven days to design and deploy the bug bounty program, with the bounty program for the Goerli testnet staking system smart contract going live on November 11. The bug bounty program will run for two weeks on testnet.
If no critical bugs are found, rewards will begin to accrue on December 7. Meanwhile, the bug bounty program will stay running until the staking program ends or the prize pool is depleted. In the case of the latter, the program committee will submit a new proposal for more funding.
