KuCoin has now partnered with Hacken to create a $1 million bug bounty program in an effort to quickly find and fix flaws in the exchange's infrastructure.
Once it was revealed that the Seychelles-based cryptocurrency exchange has joined with Hacken, a web3 cybersecurity company, to provide a $1 million bug bounty program on the Hackenproof platform, the exchange is about to launch one of the biggest bug reward programs of any crypto exchange.
The release also states that a new security landing page would be added to KuCoin's home page, providing users with a number of tools to enhance the security of their exchange account.
The collaboration is in line with the exchange's mission to enhance platform security and...
“work to resolve any vulnerabilities discovered by the researchers and ensure that KuCoin is secure and meets the highest standards for safety.”
The bug bounty program is open to developers who can find vulnerabilities in the KuCoin network and suggest fixes for them. Entries will be evaluated by Hackenproof, the bug bounty and vulnerability coordination platform.
Based on the nature of the vulnerability, rewards will vary from $50 to $1,000,000 per bug. The bugs are categorized as follows: Critical: $50,000 – $1,000,000; High: $2,000 – $49,000; Medium: $500 – $1,999 and Low: $50 – $499.
Since the decentralized finance boom started a few years ago, hacks and security breaches have become a significant problem in the cryptocurrency industry.
Many reports have been made concerning organizations and people who have been the victims of these hacks, which often take the form of exchange hacks, wallet hacks, or phishing attempts.
By far, 2022 was the worst year for cryptocurrency criminals. About 200 services and processes in the area saw more than $3.8 billion in theft last year, according to Chainalysis.
October 2022 accounted for the greatest figure with $775.7 million lost during that month alone.
The largest hack of 2022 occurred at Ronin, an Ethereum sidechain of Axie Infinity, when $625 million in USDC and ETH were stolen.
According to reports, $120 million has already been taken from 19 exchanges, protocols, and people in 2023, showing that the rate of hacks has not decreased.
The greatest vulnerability of 2023 happened in February when hackers stole $120 million from Bonq DAO by targeting the protocol's smart contract and stealing AllianceBlock tokens from the network.
Security breaches persist despite DeFi and web3's rapid development, mostly because of flaws in the protocols' smart contracts.
Due to the complexity and interpretability of smart contracts, hackers can easily find flaws in the code and take advantage of them, which usually results in the loss of customer funds on the platform.
DeFi protocols have now made an effort to address this issue by recurring smart contract audits and bug-bounty schemes like to the most recent KuCoin and Hacken project.
The protection of consumers on online platforms is the subject of government proposals.
In an effort to "unlock" the region's latent potential for industrial data, European Union legislators enacted a measure in March 2023 called the Data Act, which expressly establishes provisions for data exchange via smart contracts.
In the sense that it offers a "kill switch" to stop transaction execution in the case of a breach, this new regulation offers security for protocols' smart contracts. Moreover, it includes a clause that allows for the reset of a smart contract within a certain set of guidelines.
