The Ethereum Foundation wants friendly hackers to break the platform’s highly anticipated upgrade known as ETH 2.0.
Ethereum core developer Danny Ryan sent out the invitation on Monday, inviting coders to take a crack at breaking the blockchain testnets. The mechanics of the challenge are laid out on GitHub.
Announcing eth2 attacknets — beta-0! https://t.co/nMXChoDaVH
We welcome white hats to bring down the two beta-0 attacknets for reward and fame 🙂
Check out the new “attacknets” channel on the eth r&d discord for discussion
— dannyryan (@dannyryan) July 20, 2020
Coders are urged to remain ethical and ensure private information remains confidential. Anyone who submits an issue must be able to prove they performed the attack themselves and offer the technical details.
Ethereum says the objective of the program is to encourage and reward those who help improve the blockchain. For the current challenge, hackers will get $5,000 in either ETH or DAI cryptocurrency if they successfully take down a network.
Ryan says that while the recently released attacknets are fairly small and easy to break, the subsequent attacknets will be more difficult.
The announcement comes as the crypto community awaits the release of Ethereum’s next major upgrade. ETH 2.0 will introduce staking and sharding, which are designed to significantly improve the network’s scalability and security.