Pre-Launch Bug Bounties
The gap between mitigation review and mainnet, covered. Whitehats get a clear incentive to disclose during the window when your code is finished but not yet live, with fixed bounties for medium and high severity findings. It runs after a DualGuard contest, never on its own.
Why the window matters
There is often a gap between the end of mitigation review and the moment your contracts hold real money. An undisclosed bug found during that gap by someone who is not a whitehat does not stay undisclosed. It becomes a painful relaunch, or a drained protocol.
A bounty turns that window into a disclosure channel with a price attached, rather than dead time.
What is rewarded
Only medium and high severity issues carry a reward, and the amounts are fixed for the whole window rather than negotiated per finding. Every submission also carries a fee-on-submission, fully refundable when the report is a valid duplicate. That fee is currently the main thing standing between the queue and bulk-generated noise.
It also pressure-tests the mitigation review
The merit-based payouts reserved for the Lead Guards, and for the guards who outrank them while finishing in the top-10, are worth 30% of the prize pool. They are locked until the bounty window closes, and released only if no new issue of medium severity or higher appears.
Three outcomes are possible:
No medium or high findings. The full 30% is paid to the guards who worked the contest and the mitigation review.
Highest severity is medium. Merit payouts are halved to 15% of the prize pool, and the other 15% is reserved for the bounty pot.
Highest severity is high. The full 30% is reserved for the bounty pot.
The people who reviewed your fixes are therefore paid on whether those fixes hold, not on having reviewed them.
What it costs
A bounty cannot run without a DualGuard contest in front of it. When the two run together the platform fee is 25% of the total budget rather than 20%, and the bounty draws from the same prize pool rather than a separate one.
Scope it with us.
Tell us what you are shipping and when you launch. We come back with scope, timeline and a price, usually within two working days.