Firedancer Charges 1 SOL for Each Solana Bug Report

Jump Crypto’s Firedancer team requires a nonrefundable 1 SOL burn for every bug report, including invalid or duplicate submissions. The change follows an audit contest that produced 809 reports but only 127 unique findings.

CryptoMEV Bot NewsroomOct 27, 20263 min read

Rows of black server racks filled with stacked computer hardware in a data center. — Image: Victorgrigas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

At a glance	Details
Who	Jump Crypto’s Firedancer team
What	1 SOL burn per bug report
When	October 18, 2026
Cost	About $100
Top reward	Up to $300,000

According to CoinDesk, Jump Crypto’s Firedancer team has imposed a 1 SOL burn on every bug report, equivalent to about $100, as AI-assisted submissions flooded security reviewers.

“AI has made finding bugs cheap, but judging them is still expensive,” — Ishan Bhatt of Jump, in an Oct. 16 review.

The fee

CryptoBriefing reported that the policy took effect on October 18, 2026, and applies to every submission, including duplicates and reports that identify a genuine issue someone else already reported. Researchers who submit without burning 1 SOL can have their reports reviewed but are ineligible for a payout.

No refund is available when a submission is invalid, falls outside the program’s scope, or repeats a finding already reported. The tokens are permanently removed from circulation, and nobody receives the fee, including Jump Crypto.

Jump says the program is intended to curb spam and allow engineers more time to examine actual security flaws. The new platform caps the length of every main report section at 3,000 characters.

Larger rewards

During the period ending November 20, 2026, qualifying findings earn double the standard payout, and reports concerning Alpenglow may earn triple that amount.

Critical flaws in Alpenglow, Solana’s new voting system, can qualify for up to $300,000. That figure is a ceiling rather than a guarantee and remains at the team’s discretion.

Alpenglow consensus went live on Solana mainnet on October 21, 2026, three days after the submission-burn requirement took effect.

Contest pressure

The $1 million Firedancer audit contest held from April 9 to May 9, 2026 attracted 809 reports from 162 researchers (CryptoNews). The submissions produced 127 unique security findings after non-exploitable observations were excluded.

Of the valid submissions, close to one half duplicated earlier reports, while the queue of unresolved reports climbed as high as 299. For about 80% of the duplicates, the submission came more than three days after the first report.

When reviews began slowing, other researchers re-reported bugs that had previously entered the system but were neither fixed nor disclosed. Before the new rules, the contest imposed a $100 fee on each submission and permitted only one report from each researcher each day.

In Jump’s assessment, AI agents assisted with discovering or writing almost all submissions entered in the contest. Before accepting a finding, engineers had to reproduce the reported problem and test whether the proposed attack would succeed. Some submissions identified apparent weaknesses while missing protections elsewhere in the software.

Among the serious vulnerabilities identified was a scheduling error that could cause Firedancer to process transactions in an order different from intended, creating disagreement with other Solana validators over the resulting network state.

Trader relevance

Firedancer was developed by Jump Crypto as an alternative to Agave, the principal software used by the computers responsible for checking and processing Solana transactions. If a serious flaw exists, those computers could be unable to process payments or could diverge over account balances, with the effects reaching trades and transfers.

That stated risk reaches on-chain traders through payment processing, account balances, trade execution and transfers. Related infrastructure coverage includes CryptoMEV Bot’s Advanced Solana MEV Bot guide and its Aptos encrypted-mempool update.

Timeline

April 9–May 9, 2026 — A $1 million Firedancer audit contest attracted 809 reports from 162 researchers.
October 16, 2026 — Ishan Bhatt published Jump’s review describing the burden of reviewing AI-assisted bug reports.
October 18, 2026 — The nonrefundable 1 SOL submission-burn requirement took effect for every Firedancer bug report.
October 21, 2026 — Alpenglow consensus went live on Solana mainnet.
November 20, 2026 — The temporary doubling period for standard eligible rewards runs through this date.