Introduction
As different industries adopt the blockchain into their systems, as an essentially software-based product, it is inevitable that software bugs, security flaws, and vulnerabilities will at some point appear in the systems (Melo, 2023). The inevitability of bugs and vulnerabilities in smart contracts and blockchain-based systems presents important security issues; if malicious actors uncover vulnerabilities within a smart contract, they will be able to exploit and cause damage to the system. As such, it is crucial to identify these vulnerabilities in order to mitigate and prevent any attempts by malicious actors to exploit these gaps. In this paper, we will explore the role of bug bounty programs in identifying and addressing security vulnerabilities in blockchain-based systems.
Bug Bounties
Vulnerabilities within smart contracts and blockchain-based systems are inevitable, and as such, much effort has always been placed into identifying these bugs and possible means of exploitation. In fact, even before the emergence of Web3, companies hired hackers to identify bugs in their systems in exchange for financial compensation, in order to fix them before malicious hackers found and exploited them. This is what is called “bug bounty programs”. In bug bounty programs, companies display themselves to the public through bug bounty platforms such as Immunefi (which is web3 specific) and essentially allow the community to analyze their open-source smart contracts (in the case of web3) in scope. Once a potential vulnerability is identified by a community member, then to incentivise the rightful reporting....
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