Belt Finance, an automated market maker (AMM) protocol on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) that employs a yield optimization approach, claims to have awarded the biggest reward in the history of decentralized finance (DeFi) to a white hat hacker who avoided a $10 million bug issue. Alexander Schlindwein, an industry white hat programmer, found the flaw in Belt Finance’s protocol this week and informed the company. Schlindwein was compensated generously with $1.05 million, the bulk of which ($1 million) was enabled and given by Immunefi, with an extra $50,000 provided by Binance Smart Chain’s Priority One program.
Immunefi is a market leader in cryptocurrency software security. Since its founding, the platform is said to have paid out more than $3 million to white hat hackers who successfully discovered technical infrastructure vulnerabilities in smart contracts and cryptocurrency platforms.
Priority One is a BSC project that began in July to enhance the security of decentralized applications (DApps) running inside the platform’s native ecosystem. Similar to Immunefi’s structure, the service offers a $10 million reward fund to blockchain bounty hunters who effectively contribute to the prevention of security breaches across 100 DApps.
The white hat programmer sent a formal report to Immunefi with the exploit’s proof of concept and detailed explanation. Immunefi responded promptly to the critical report, and it was forwarded to the Belt team. Belt quickly verified the report’s authenticity and started developing a remedy, which successfully fixed the issue. While DeFi’s security breaches continue to be a source of worry, others have suggested that such events would help the fledgling ecosystem in the long run by highlighting areas of vulnerability.