A flood of AI-assisted bug reports has prompted the team behind Solana’s Firedancer software to charge researchers 1 SOL, worth about $100, per submission, aiming to cut spam and give engineers more time to investigate genuine security flaws.

The tokens must be burned, which permanently removes them from circulation. Under terms updated Monday, the cost is nonrefundable even if a report is invalid, outside the program’s scope or duplicates an earlier finding. Reports submitted without a burn are ineligible for rewards.

Trading firm Jump Crypto built Firedancer as an alternative to Agave, the main software used by the computers that check and process Solana transactions.

A serious flaw can stop those computers processing payments or make them disagree about account balances, disrupting trades and transfers. Hundreds of duplicate or unworkable reports take engineers’ time away from investigating and fixing those vulnerabilities.

A $1 million audit competition held between April 9 and May 9 attracted 809 reports from 162 researchers. Those produced 127 unique security findings, excluding non-exploitable observations. Nearly half of valid submissions were duplicates.

“AI has made finding bugs cheap, but judging them is still expensive,” Jump’s Ishan Bhatt wrote in an Oct. 16 review.

Engineers still had to reproduce reported problems and check whether the proposed attacks could work. Some submissions flagged apparent weaknesses while missing protections elsewhere in the software.

The backlog peaked at 299 open reports. As reviews slowed, other researchers rediscovered bugs that had already been submitted but remained unfixed or undisclosed. About 80% of duplicates arrived more than three days after the original report.

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