Telegram Announces Coding Contest with $400k in Rewards

Telegram, an instant messaging app, has announced a contest for developers with a prize fund of up to $400,000.

As announced on the Telegram Contests channel on September 24, the contest relates to the Telegram Open Network (TON) blockchain being developed by Telegram. CThe contest ends on October 15.

Smart Contracts, Improvements and Bug Bounties

The main part of the contest involves building at least one of 5 smart contracts specified in the contest document using the tools provided in the TON blockchain distribution.

The list of smart contracts that developers can build include a multi-signature wallet, two types of simple TON DNS Resolver smart contracts, a synchronous two-party payment channel, and an asynchronous two-party payment channel.

In addition, developers who implement at least one of the 5 smart contracts can also participate in the FunC / TON VM improvement contest where they need to come up with “a patch to the FunC and/or TON VM sources” and write an improved version of the same smart-contract using the recently-added FunC features.

The total prize fund allocated to the smart contract developers, according to the contest details, is $200,000.

However, Telegram has promised a larger prize of up to $200,000 for its TON Blockchain bug bounty contest. It requires developers to find a bug and actually exploit the bug on its test network such as by stealing funds from somebody else’s wallet.

Previous Contests by Telegram

Telegram has previously conducted contests for developers to break its cryptographic encryption. The contests in 2014 and 2015 ended with no winners. The way the contest was structured and the purpose of the contest itself was criticised by security researchers and members of the cryptographic community at the time.

The latest contest appears to be the first involving Telegram’s TON blockchain. In 2018, Telegram raised $1.7 billion in the second-largest ICO ever to build TON. Telegram officially released the TON “testnet” explorer and node software on Sept. 6. The launch of Gram, the digital token native to TON, is expected in October.