MakerDAO launches largest bug bounty ever, $10 million reward

Immunefi’s largest bug bounty to date is designed to help MakerDAO pinpoint potential vulnerabilities in its smart contracts and applications to prevent monetary losses.

MakerDAO has announced that it will begin offering bounties of up to $10 million to white hat hackers and cybersecurity experts who point out legitimate security threats in its smart contracts.

Maker (MAKER)'s preemptive program on its smart contracts is the largest ever on bug bounty platform Immunefi. In fact, if anyone got the money, it would be equal to the $10 million total that Immunefi has paid out to date from active and inactive events. Its website claims that the discovered vulnerabilities have prevented up to $20 billion in losses to hackers.

White hat hackers receive compensation ranging from $1,000 for low-level vulnerabilities believed to exist to up to $10 million for critical issues found in Maker's smart contracts and applications. Payments will be made in the DAI stablecoin. The second largest bug bounty on Immunefi was a $3.3 million bounty from Olympus DAO.

MakerDAO is the community that governs how DAI is staked and used from Maker's vaults. DAI is currently the fifth-largest stablecoin with a market cap of $9.7 billion, according to CoinGecko.

Before its CEO and founder Rune Christensen announced the dissolution of the foundation in July 2021, the Maker Foundation controlled the governance aspects of Maker, making the DAO “completely self-sufficient.”

In a February 11 statement, Immunefi co-founder Travin Keith said:

“We’re excited to announce one of the key pillars of our mission to launch and maintain a bug bounty program that will help MakerDAO keep it secure.”

This new bug bounty campaign comes at a time when smart contract exploits appear to be on the rise, and this new vulnerability comes at a time when smart contract vulnerabilities appear to be on the rise, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damages in the past two weeks alone. Yesterday, hackers took over $10 million from Dego Finance through a smart contract vulnerability.

On February 7, the smart contract of the token bridge Meter.io was hacked, resulting in a loss of $4.4 million. On February 2, Wormhole Token Bridge’s smart contracts on Solana (SOL) were exploited for $321 million, the largest hack so far this year.