The largest scale in history! Ethereum offers a $2 million bounty to find vulnerabilities in the Fusaka upgrade.

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced the launch of a security competition with a prize pool of up to $2 million, aimed at ensuring the security and stability of the upcoming Fusaka upgrade. This large-scale security audit initiative invites researchers from around the world to participate in identifying potential vulnerabilities before the official deployment of Fusaka, laying a solid foundation for the next phase of development of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Ethereum Foundation launches limited-time reward mechanism to encourage early participation

This initiative announced on September 15, (https://blog.ethereum.org/2025/09/15/fusaka-audit-content) will conduct a four-week competition on the Sherlock testnet, running from September 15 to October 13. To maximize early participation, the Ethereum Foundation has designed a unique reward mechanism:

· The vulnerabilities discovered in the first week will receive double reward points.

· The vulnerabilities discovered in the second week will receive 1.5 times the reward points.

· Maintain standard rewards for the next two weeks

This “time-limited” approach aims to ensure the most thorough testing during critical stages of development while incentivizing researchers to engage in auditing work as early as possible. This competition has also received support from key participants in the ecosystem, including Gnosis and Lido, which donated $100,000 and $25,000, respectively, as additional rewards.

There is controversy in the industry regarding the timing of the competition

Despite the widespread support for the competition, some experts have raised concerns about its timing. Christine Kim, former Vice President of Research at Galaxy Digital, stated that holding an audit competition may be premature given that developers are still discovering vulnerabilities on the Fusaka development network. This viewpoint reflects the community's concerns about balancing the need to ensure the security of the upgrade with maintaining development progress.

Fusaka Upgrade: A Key Step in Ethereum Scalability

The Fusaka upgrade will bring a series of important technical improvements to the Ethereum network, aimed at enhancing scalability and transaction throughput, while not affecting the overall performance of the network. These improvements include:

Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS): Optimizing the way data is distributed in the network

Adjust gas limit: Improve network processing efficiency for transactions.

Adjust blob parameters: support processing a larger volume of transactions

These technological upgrades are crucial for Ethereum to cope with the growing network demands, especially against the backdrop of the continuous expansion of Layer 2 solutions and DeFi applications.

Cautious Implementation Roadmap

Facing potential technical challenges, the Ethereum development team has adopted a cautious implementation strategy. According to the current plan:

September 29: Deployment on the Holesky testnet

October 13: Deployed on the Sepolia testnet

October 27: Deploy on the Hoodi testnet

The mainnet launch will only take place when all testnets have successfully upgraded and the Devnet-5 analysis confirms that the network is operating stably. This phased approach reflects the development team's high regard for network security.

The launch of this security competition not only showcases the Ethereum community's pursuit of technical excellence but also reflects the core value of open collaboration in blockchain development. As the competition progresses, researchers from around the world will work together to ensure that Ethereum's next-generation infrastructure can safely and efficiently support future innovations and applications.