Coinbase pays $250k to a hacker who saved them from losing billions
Tree of Alpha, an anonymous white hat hacker who saved the crypto industry from losing billions of dollars through responsible disclosure, announced that he received a $250,000 bounty from Coinbase.
Tree of Alpha revealed a very dangerous bug
The bug was described by the anonymous hacker Tree of Alpha as being related to Coinbase's Advanced Trading platform. Unlike the simpler user interface for retail investors to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, the Advanced Trading platform allows for more sophisticated trading tools and ordering methods. During his research, Tree of Alpha was initially surprised to learn that he could sell "0.0243 ETH" to get "0.0243 BTC" by using the pair BTC-USD that he had not enabled for trading on his account.Further testing revealed that the problem was more severe, as users could place an order to sell 50 SHIB (worth $0.001) for 50 BTC, which was executed through Coinbase's order books. As the white hat hacker subsequently noted, this was a potential "market nuking" situation, as a black-hat hacker would have used this strategy to gradually empty Coinbase's order books and attempt to withdraw assets. Black-hat hackers could also have attempted to create a market panic by taking short positions on other exchanges to maximize their profits.
Is a $250,000 bounty too low?
Since Tree of Alpha did not abuse the bug, he found it but asked Coinbase to fix it. He received a $250,000 bounty as a reward for his investigation. Given the seriousness of the bug and the fact that it may have cost the market billions of dollars, other users question this amount, believing that Coinbase should have rewarded him with much higher compensation. Some users argue that he should have received at least a million dollars and that this is not a good image for Coinbase.Although many people think that Tree of Alpha is not fairly compensated, it does not look like he himself is upset about it. In his tweets, he thanked Coinbase for responding so quickly to his problems & it's clear that the anonymous hacker is not in it for the money. He's known for experimenting with websites, looking for insightful information he can use to make profitable trades. And occasionally, the savvy hacker comes across a major security vulnerability that he can report.
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