GetBlock Magazine - What happened? Ethereum developers will hold the first hackathon in blockchain history. The event, called Attackathon, with a prize pool of $2 million, will last four weeks, during which participants will search for vulnerabilities in the protocol code in the lead-up to the Pectra hard fork. The team notes that Attackathon “will be the largest crowdsourced security audit” of the blockchain codebase.
Developer announcement
What else is known? According to the Ethereum Protocol Security (EPS) research group, the event will begin with a technical walkthrough of the blockchain code to prepare participants to understand potential vulnerabilities. Rewards will be issued for the detection of the most significant bugs, subject to the preparation of a compliant report.
At the end of the hackathon, its partner, the vulnerability scanning platform Immunefi, will collect the results and prepare a report detailing the errors found.
The Ethereum team contributed $500,000 to the prize fund, and called on sponsors to contribute another 1.5 million.
EPS plans to hold similar hackathons before each hard fork that involves making changes to the code base. The next Pectra hard fork is expected to take place in late 2024 or early 2025. It will combine the Prague and Electra updates.
The most significant changes within the framework of the hard fork will be the introduction of a social recovery function, which will relieve users of the need to remember a 24-word private key, as well as the provision of smart contract functions to wallets.
Previously, the Solana blockchain team, together with Immunefi, also launched a reward program for finding vulnerabilities in anticipation of the release of the Firedancer client-validator, designed to increase the throughput and stability of the network.
