Private Bug Bounty

A Private Bug Bounty is a vulnerability reward program open only to an invited group of researchers rather than the public. Where a public bug bounty maximizes the number of eyes on a system, a private program maximizes trust per eye: the protocol knows who is looking at its code, findings stay confidential, and there is no public signal that the codebase is under scrutiny.

Protocols choose private programs for three common reasons. First, confidentiality: an early-stage team may not want its unaudited code advertised as a target. Second, signal quality: invited researchers are selected for track record, so triage effort goes to credible reports rather than noise. Third, staging: many teams run a private round with trusted researchers before opening a public program, catching the accessible bugs while controlling disclosure.

The format also appears inside security communities as a live practice: a member protocol's codebase is put in front of the community's vetted auditors in a moderated session, functioning as an internal, trusted bug bounty. The founders get many qualified eyes they could not afford individually; the researchers get a real target with explicit permission; and every finding is disclosed privately to the team. Like all bounty formats, a private program complements pre-deployment review rather than replacing it: it finds bugs in code that is already carrying risk.