Crypto Exchanges
By Jean-Luc Maracon
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Coinbase Tightens the Bounty Rules. Coinbase moved fast on this. On July 29, the exchange narrowed its Web2 bug bounty program to…
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Real Vulnerabilities Found Amid the Noise. Not everything coming in is garbage, though. External researchers Joe Almeida and Anh Nguyen found…
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AI as Both Tool and Threat. The irony here is that AI is creating the problem and also being used to hunt for solutions.
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Coinbase is drowning in junk. The crypto exchange said bug bounty submissions are on pace to triple in 2026 compared to the prior year, and the culprit is pretty much what you'd…
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The numbers are rough. During the first half of 2026, only 4% of reports submitted through HackerOne were deemed valid and actually paid out.
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Of the HackerOne reports closed in the first half of the year, 44% were duplicates. Another 37% contained information that wasn't exploitable. And 15% were just flat-out invalid.
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Coinbase moved fast on this. On July 29, the exchange narrowed its Web2 bug bounty program to focus only on high, critical, and extreme vulnerabilities.
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The restructuring of the bounty criteria is a direct response to the AI submission flood. When your review queue is dominated by low-quality automated reports, the fix isn't to…
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Read also: Coldcard Breach Triggers 233,000 Bitcoin Move as AI Exposes 5-Year Code Flaw
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Separately, an AI-assisted audit of Bitcoin security flagged 4,962 potential issues across 390 repositories in under 28 hours. That's a wild number.
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And the broader numbers are bad. A comprehensive onchain security assessment found 212 exploits in the first half of 2026, with losses hitting $1.
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Coinbase's approach tries to thread that needle. AI tools scan for potential issues at scale.
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See also: AI Reasoning Models Leak 62 Live API Keys Through Single Encryption Key Flaw
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The exchange is also cutting about 700 jobs as part of a broader restructuring aimed at improving efficiency, partly by leaning harder into AI-driven productivity.
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The 4% valid rate in the first half of 2026 is the number that sticks.
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