Ethereum Foundation launches a 2 million USD security competition for the Fusaka upgrade

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has just announced a security competition worth 2 million USD to strengthen the upcoming Fusaka upgrade.

The initiative announced on September 15 invites global researchers to review the source code of the upgrade. Rewards will be given for vulnerability discoveries before Fusaka officially launches.

According to EF, the competition will take place over 4 weeks on the Sherlock testnet, from September 15 to October 13. To encourage early participation, findings in the first week will earn double points, while in the second week, they will earn a factor of 1.5. This "timely" approach aims to ensure the most thorough level of scrutiny at key stages of the development process.

The competition is also co-sponsored by Gnosis and Lido, with contributions of 100,000 USD and 25,000 USD, respectively. EF emphasizes that this participation demonstrates that the vast Ethereum ecosystem has a direct interest in ensuring the safety of the upgrade – from developers, validators to end users.

Nevertheless, some opinions suggest that this timing is not really appropriate. Christine Kim, former Vice President of Research at Galaxy Digital, questioned whether organizing an audit competition while developers are still discovering bugs on the devnet of Fusaka is a wise choice.

New Features of Fusaka

The Fusaka upgrade will bring a range of technical improvements aimed at increasing the scalability and transaction throughput of Ethereum without affecting network performance.

The focus of the update includes features:

• Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS): optimizing data distribution.
• Adjust gas limit: improve network performance.
• Blob parameter tuning: supports handling larger transaction volumes.

However, this upcoming upgrade is facing many challenges, raising concerns about the risk of delays.

This has prompted Ethereum developers to clarify the deployment roadmap in the recent All Core Devs meeting. They stated that although there is no official activation date on the mainnet yet, the progress will depend on the results of the deployment on the testnets.

According to the current plan, Fusaka will be deployed on Holesky on September 29, followed by Sepolia on October 13 and Hoodi on October 27. After that, activation on the mainnet will only occur when all testnets have successfully upgraded and the analysis results from Devnet-5 confirm that the network is operating stably.

Thach Sanh