Ethereum Doubles Bug Bounty for Upcoming Shapella Upgrade

The Ethereum Foundation has decided to double the bounty for those who discover and report vulnerabilities affecting the upcoming Shapella upgrade.

Increased Bug Bounty for Shapella

In preparation for the Shapella upgrade, the Ethereum Foundation has announced a substantial increase in its bug bounty program, raising the reward to $500,000.

During a meeting on March 23, Fredrik Svantes, a security researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, emphasized that the project has decided to double the reward for any critical vulnerabilities in the Shapella codebase. Svantes stated:

"We're offering double the reward for any vulnerabilities impacting the Shapella code. Get out there and start hunting bugs—the bounty is now up to half a million dollars."

A bug bounty program is organized by projects, businesses, or third parties to incentivize the community to find and report security flaws in software or technology products. In return, the organization running the program rewards those who identify the bugs.

Doubling the bounty underscores the Ethereum team's commitment to network security ahead of the Shanghai deployment. The bounty program covers various aspects of the system, including the blockchain consensus model and cybersecurity.

Parithosh Jayanthi, an engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, revealed that after releasing the final client versions, developers will initiate a "shadow fork" of the mainnet to test those clients.

A shadow fork is a test run against the mainnet rather than a testnet, ensuring the upgrade performs smoothly on the live blockchain. Several shadow forks have already been conducted in preparation for Shapella, with the final one set to happen soon.

In the same meeting, developers urged all validators on the Ethereum network to upgrade their nodes before the launch to ensure a smooth transition. Overall, the Ethereum team is rigorously testing and hardening the security of Shapella.

As previously reported, Shanghai—referred to as "Shapella" by the Ethereum development team—is the next upgrade on the roadmap following The Merge. The network first needed to complete testnets on Zhejiang (February 7), Sepolia (February 27), and Goerli (March 14), with each testnet spaced three weeks apart. By the evening of March 16, the Ethereum team officially confirmed that the Shapella upgrade will go live at approximately 5:27 PM on April 12, 2023 (Vietnam time).

The community is eagerly anticipating the Shapella hard fork—not only because it marks a significant milestone for the Ethereum network, but also because EIP-4895 in Shanghai will unlock a substantial amount of ETH that has been staked as part of Ethereum 2.0 under The Merge last year.

Since the blockchain transitioned from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), transactions are validated by users who stake ETH to earn rewards. Since the ETH 2.0 staking contract opened in December 2020, the amount locked up has surpassed 17.8 million ETH, representing approximately 14.8% of the total ETH in circulation.

ETH Staking Statistics in the Ethereum 2.0 Contract. Source: Beaconcha.in