July 2026 Immunefi Ecosystem Update

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A Security Snapshot of July:

• Attackers took roughly $110M across crypto in July.
• Immunefi researchers were paid $2.32M for 374 confirmed bugs
• Community members staked 38.2M IMU behind 305 hackers,
• Immunefi Research: Immunefi audit competitions found 4x more serious bugs per engagement than tier-1 audits. 

Immunefi Research: Out of 1,178 tier-1 audits, the median found zero critical bugs

As part of this research, Immunefi analyzed every public report from Trail of Bits, Zellic, and OpenZeppelin have released. The median audit found zero critical or high-severity bugs, and half found none at all.

Immunefi ran 58 audit competitions against the industry's 1,178 tier-1 audits, 5% as many engagements, and found four times as many serious bugs per engagement. That is 6.2 serious bugs per competition against 1.5 per audit.

The gap grows wider when accounting for the different costs of different auditing solutions. On average, a critical bug costs $6,548 to catch in an audit competition, rising to about $66K in a private tier-1 audit, and $24.5M once an attacker finds it first. 

The impact on throughput is also noticeable, with roughly 92% of crypto’s critical disclosures flowing through Immunefi, about 14x the nearest platform.

Protocols should not confuse being audited with being completely safe.

Interested in launching a bug bounty or audit competition with Immunefi? Talk to us →

July Highlights

38.2M IMU pledged behind 305 security researchers, up 46% in a month.

Following the launch of Season 3 of Hacker Pledging, during which everyone can pledge behind their favourite security researchers, over 38.2 million IMU have been pledged behind 305 researchers. This is a 46% month-on-month growth, with more than 11.6M IMU pledged since the July 16th launch alone. 

Pledge IMU to a security researcher here to earn from their success.

Five new programs went live, led by sBTC at $250k

New bug bounty program launches for researchers in July:

• sBTC
• GMTrade
• Intuition
• Horizen
• Leather

Interested in hunting bounties? Sign up to start submitting → 

July by the Numbers:

Over $2.32M was paid to Security Researchers in July for bug bounty programs and audit competitions.

Confirmed and paid reports were up 18% for bug bounty programs with the single largest payout of $250,000 for a critical issue.

The Base Azul ($250K pool) and Firedancer V1 ($1M pool) audit competitions completed reward distribution in July, paying roughly $750K across 606 paid findings.

Immunefi Platform Progress 

Immunefi Studio (Signal, Review, and Academy), are driving steady usage growth across our early adopter cohort.

• Studio Review: Usage grew +165% following a new UI launch, expanded duplicate detection, and support for 11 new chains.
• Studio Signal: Sustained >90% weekly active usage with the addition of real-time program webhooks, upgraded metric displays, and new Asset Notes functionality.
• Studio Academy: Successfully reinstated 64% of invited banned accounts via technical compliance testing, with 99% now actively participating as high-quality contributors.

Ultimately, everything Immunefi built in July centers on boosting security researcher effectiveness and productivity so whitehats can multiply their impact and keep protocols secure.

The early results are very promising, and we look forward to scaling access up.

Content Highlights

• Audit Competitions Beat Private Audits on Every Metric That Matters - Mitchell Amador’s first-party breakdown of 1,178 audits. (X Articles)
• What this year’s $972M in crypto hacks tells us about security - Immunefi’s H1 data on the attacker shift up the stack. (CoinDesk)
• Security research is splitting into two eras: before AI and after - how AI workflows are reshaping vulnerability discovery. (@immunefi)

Join the Mission

Immunefi is the security platform for the onchain economy; 92% of crypto's critical vulnerability disclosures flow through it, with it helping to prevent more than $25 billion in hacks across 650-plus protocols.

The Immunefi Foundation is scaling security to save crypto from hacks and build a safe, resilient onchain economy. The IMU token coordinates protocols, researchers, and community to continuously compound security for a safer onchain future.

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