Fund a bounty
Sponsors fund the bounty on a rung in USDC. The bounty pays whoever solves that rung's discrete logarithm and claims it, so a rung with a larger bounty gives every lab and cryptanalyst a reason to claim the moment they can, instead of keeping a result quiet.
How to fund
- Open Bounties in the app and connect your wallet.
- Find the rung, enter an amount in USDC and choose Fund.
- Approve the transaction. The deposit moves into the rung's bounty vault, and a receipt for it appears under Your receipts.
You can fund any rung that reads Open, as often as you like, and any number of sponsors can fund the same rung.
What a deposit commits to
| Term | Value |
|---|---|
| Collateral | USDC |
| Withdrawal before the sunset | Not possible: deposits are irrevocable until 2040-01-01 |
| If the rung falls | The whole bounty pays the solver's recipient in the same instruction that sets the rung to Solved |
| From the sunset on | Each receipt reclaims its share of whatever the vault then holds |
| Protocol cut on sponsorship | 0 %: every USDC goes to the bounty |
The deadline is what makes the bounty credible: nobody can pull it the day before a lab is ready to claim.
Your receipt
Each deposit mints a receipt to your wallet: a Token-2022 token, one mint per rung, with the NonTransferable extension, so it stays with the wallet that funded. It records how much you funded and when, and it is your claim on the vault after the sunset.
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Rung | The rung you funded |
| Funded | The USDC you deposited |
| Funded at | The time and slot of the deposit |
| Receipts | One receipt unit per USDC unit deposited; together they are your share of the vault |
| Reclaim after | 2040-01-01 |
Bounties grow from fees too
30 % of the protocol's fees flow into the bounty vaults, split across rungs by the open interest their markets carried over time. A rung that people hedge against grows its own bounty. See Fees and settlement.
After the sunset
From 2040-01-01, a receipt holder can reclaim. The amount is your receipts' fraction of everything the vault holds at that moment, including fees that arrived after any payout:
In the app, Reclaim on a rung's row under Your receipts redeems all of that rung's receipts in one transaction, and the receipts you redeem are burned. The program also accepts part of your receipts, so a client can reclaim part and keep the rest. The rung stays claimable after the sunset too: a claim and a reclaim draw on the same vault.