The Ethereum Foundation has announced a significant increase in the maximum reward for identifying vulnerabilities, doubling it to $500,000 ahead of the eagerly anticipated Shapella hard fork on April 12th.
This upgrade, which combines the names of the Capella and Shanghai forks, has been long-awaited and will allow validators to withdraw their ether that was locked in staking. Moreover, it includes several other improvements, such as reducing gas costs.
During a developer meeting, Fredrik Svantes, a security specialist at the Ethereum Foundation, emphasized the importance of identifying any potential vulnerabilities that could affect the Shapella codebase.
As a result, the bug bounty program will cover several aspects of the network, including the consensus model, proof of stake, and network security.
Parithos Jayanthi, a member of the DevOps team at the Ethereum Foundation, confirmed that the final releases of the client software are almost ready, and the developers are preparing to launch the last shadow fork of the mainnet for testing.
Jayanthi also disclosed that several shadow forks had been developed in anticipation of Shapella’s release. The Ethereum Foundation urged all Ethereum network node operators to update their software before launching Shapella.
In late February, developers activated the Shanghai hard fork on the Sepolia testnet, and in March, they successfully deployed it on the Goerli testnet.