The Ethereum Foundation has announced a $2 million security contest designed to enhance future Fusaka upgrades.
The initiative, announced on September 15th, invites researchers around the world to audit their upgrade codebase. Rewards will be distributed to participants who reveal their vulnerability before the upgrade is published.
EF explained that the competition will be organized as a four-week event at Sherlock Testnet, which will take place from September 15th to October 13th. To encourage early participation, results reported in the first week will receive double points, while results in the second week will receive a 1.5x multiplier.
The Foundation emphasized that this time-sensitive approach ensures maximum scrutiny at critical stages of upgrade development.
EF revealed that Gnosis and Lido co-hosted the initiative, donating $100,000 and $25,000, respectively.
According to the foundation, their participation shows the broader ecosystem interests of all layers of both security developers, balliters and end users alike, as well as the Ethereum upgrade process.
However, not all observers are convinced that timing is ideal for auditing.
Christine Kim, former research vice president at Galaxy Digital, questioned whether it would be wise to launch an audit race while the developers still identify the Fusaka Devnets bug.
Upgrading when you’re hungry
Fusaka upgrades offer a variety of technical improvements aimed at increasing Ethereum scalability and transaction throughput without compromising network efficiency.
The center of the update is sophisticated blob parameters designed to handle higher transaction volumes, such as peer data availability sampling (Peerdas), streamline data distribution, revise gas limits to optimize performance, and handle higher transaction volumes.
However, pressing updates face major challenges and encourage fear of delays.
This has led Ethereum developers to clarify their deployment schedules during all the latest Core Devs calls.
They explained that the mainnet activation date remains undecided, but the upgrade timeline will depend on the progress of the testnet deployment.
According to current plans, the upgrade will be rolled out at Holesky on September 29th, followed by Sepolia on October 13th and Hoodie on October 27th.
Following this, they emphasized that mainnet activation will only move forward after a successful upgrade, and analysis from devnet-5 confirmed that the network is working as expected.
