Alpenglow bounty requires 0.5 SOL filing fee

Anza requires security researchers to pay a non-refundable 0.5 SOL fee for each Alpenglow finding submitted through a designated portal before the 16:00 UTC Aug. 19 deadline. The portal burns the fee on receipt and converts each submission into a confidential GitHub Security Advisory. Reports sent by other channels are not eligible.

The temporary two-week competition opens a specific portion of Alpenglow code for review. The scope includes the Votor voting engine, BLS signature and certificate verification, vote and certificate messages, the TowerBFT migration path and specified validator integration surfaces. The rules state Alpenglow was excluded from the standing Agave bounty during development, monorepo migration and internal audits.

Researchers must pay the 0.5 SOL fee when they submit a report through the required portal. Anza evaluates validity, severity, duplication and reward only after the fee is paid. Each submission must identify the commit where the flaw first appeared, reproduce the issue on that commit and arrive while the bug remains unfixed on Agave master. The competition runs against a moving version of Agave master, so a fix merged to master can end a report’s eligibility even if the researcher reproduced the flaw on an earlier in-window commit.

A proof-of-concept is required. The rules prohibit exploitation on mainnet or public testnets; findings must be demonstrated on a local fork, a multi-node harness or a simulation. Publicly known issues, previously disclosed bugs, test code, third-party cryptography dependencies and ordinary TowerBFT-only paths are excluded from eligibility.

Priority and award decisions are based on the evidence presented rather than the filing timestamp. The earliest report that meets Anza’s proof-of-concept requirement and assessed severity receives the award for that root cause. Placeholders and duplicate reports generally do not receive awards unless a later submission demonstrates a strictly higher assessed severity.

The announced aggregate pool for Alpenglow is 50,000 SOL, but that full amount unlocks only for the highest severity classification. The pool unlocks in stages: 10,000 SOL for DoS or other issues, 20,000 SOL for liveness or availability failures, 30,000 SOL for consensus or safety violations and 50,000 SOL for loss-of-funds defects. Individual award ranges are specified: loss-of-funds findings qualify for 6,250 to 25,000 SOL, consensus or safety violations 3,125 to 12,500 SOL, liveness 1,250 to 5,000 SOL and DoS 315 to 1,250 SOL. If approved awards would exceed the unlocked pool, Anza reduces payouts proportionally. No single award will exceed 25,000 SOL under the announced ranges.

Adjudication closes on Sept. 2. Payments are issued after adjudication and completion of KYC. Awards are paid as lump sums in SOL and then locked for 12 months under the Agave bounty terms. The filing fee is removed from the researcher’s wallet immediately and is non-refundable; award funds remain illiquid for a year.

Alpenglow proposes a backwards-incompatible replacement for Solana’s Proof-of-History and TowerBFT consensus stack. Votor uses BLS-based vote and certificate aggregation and verification. Notarization, skip, finalization and notar-fallback certificates require 60% of stake, while fast finalization requires 80%. The proposal retains Turbine for data dissemination and specifies a 20+20 security model with 40% crash-failure resilience. The overview identifies implementation risk and a challenging migration path.

Anza included both core consensus crates and validator code that process certificates, rewards and finalization state. The TowerBFT handoff is within the temporary bounty scope so transition points between old and new logic are reviewable. Confidentiality rules keep findings private until fixes are merged; code awaiting mainnet activation can remain under embargo until fixes are merged and relevant feature gates activate. The rules do not set a separate measure of participation or report quality to resolve the tradeoff between the filing fee and placeholder reports; the published rules state the proof-of-concept requirement and the fee are intended to reduce low-effort submissions while acknowledging they may limit reports whose impact is uncertain until adjudication is complete.