In anticipation of the upcoming Ethereum blockchain upgrade known as Shapella, the Ethereum Foundation has doubled the maximum bug bounty to $500,000 for identifying related vulnerabilities.

The highly-anticipated Shapella upgrade, also referred to as Shanghai-Capella, is scheduled for release on the mainnet on April 12 at 10:27 a.m. UTC, at block number 6,209,536. Its main feature is Ethereum Improvement Proposal-4895, which will enable validator staking withdrawals on the main network for the first time. It also includes three other improvements aimed at optimizing gas costs for specific activities.

In a developers meeting on Thursday, Fredrik Svantes, a security researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, highlighted the increased reward as part of the last-minute testing efforts.

"There's a 2x multiplier for any vulnerabilities that affect the Shapella codebase. Go ahead and start looking for more vulnerabilities as the max bounty payout for Shapella-specific issues is now up to half a million dollars," Svantes said.

(By Vishal Chawla)