White hat hackers are fixing blockchains, earning extra cash

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Powers can be used for good or evil – it always depends on one’s own moral fortitude, or lack thereof. Those who are strong enough know that their powers should be used for good and are helping to better the world. This is true with hackers, as well, and some of the best hackers in the world are earning money by helping to improve the cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystems.

Over the past seven weeks, “white hat” hackers have picked up more than $32,150 in bounty rewards for finding and plugging security flaws in crypto and blockchain projects, including Coinbase, EOS, Brave and others. 15 firms in total, according to a report by Hard Fork, issued the rewards from March 28 to May 16 and which covered 30 publicly-released bug reports.

Omise, which is behind the OmiseGo crypto, and Augur needed to have the most repairs. Omise reported six issues and Augur, a blockchain-powered prediction market that has fallen on hard times, reported three. Brave, which offers the secure Brave web browser, also reported three.

Also included in the list are Block.one, Coinbase, Monero and Cobinhood. The first two each had one bug, while the latter duo had two each.

The amount of payment typically depends on the severity of the issue. Some only reward $100, but others can go to as much as $10,000, or more. Block.one, which offers the EOS blockchain, gave one white hat hacker $10,000 for one repair. The same was seen by the startup Aeternity.

TRON gave one researcher $3,100 after he realized that the platform was open to being flooded with malicious smart contracts. Left uncorrected, it could have resulted in the entire network crashing.

Other platforms, such as the Binance exchange, offer their own bounty programs, as well. Binance is willing to give out as much as $100,000 for a crucial repair. Too bad it didn’t find any takers before hackers allegedly made off with $40 million in Bitcoin Core (BTC) earlier this month.

The crypto space is evolving and improving on a daily basis. There is still a lot of work to be done, but those who work to make it better are making history. Those who work to destroy it will be forgotten.