While global governments, central banks and regulators continue to hash out their proposed responses to the Libra cryptocurrency project, Facebook and its partners are quietly moving ahead with their preparations for launch.
Indeed, the Libra Association announced on its blog on Tuesday that it was launching a public bug bounty program in partnership with hacker-powered security platform HackerOne.
The first phase of testing began as soon as the Libra project was announced on June 18 with a bug bounty test open to around 50 security experts. Now the program is open to the public the association wants to uncover issues while the Libra Blockchain is still in testnet and no real money in circulation.
Getting it Right
Bug bounty testing is a well-established way of detecting vulnerabilities in software, and participants can receive up to $10,000 for uncovering the most serious flaws, Libra said.
When, or if, it launches, Libra is likely to be a powerful magnet for hackers and other cyber-criminals given the sheer size of Facebook’s user base alone. Acknowledging this, the Libra blog concluded:
We know it will take a global community to launch a global cryptocurrency, and we are committed to taking the time to get this right.
