Flat-Rate Rewards vs Sliding Scale Based on Severity (CVSS)

Flat-Rate Rewards excel at operational simplicity and predictable budgeting by offering a fixed payout for any valid vulnerability, regardless of severity. This model eliminates complex scoring debates and administrative overhead, making it ideal for programs seeking to attract a high volume of submissions across a broad attack surface. For example, platforms like Immunefi have seen success with flat-rate bounties for new or niche protocols where establishing clear CVSS baselines is difficult, leading to faster triage and researcher engagement.

Sliding Scale (CVSS-Based) Rewards take a different approach by aligning payouts directly with the calculated risk and impact of a vulnerability. This strategy, used by giants like Google and Microsoft, creates a meritocratic incentive structure where critical bugs like remote code execution can command rewards exceeding $100,000, while lower-severity issues receive proportionally less. This results in a trade-off: it precisely targets high-impact security research but requires robust triage processes and can lead to disputes over CVSS scoring, potentially slowing down payouts.

The key trade-off: If your priority is predictable budgeting, administrative simplicity, and encouraging broad ecosystem scrutiny, choose a Flat-Rate model. If you prioritize precisely incentivizing the discovery of critical, business-impacting vulnerabilities and have mature triage capabilities, choose a CVSS-Based Sliding Scale.

Flat-Rate Rewards excel at predictability and simplicity because they offer a fixed payout for any valid vulnerability, regardless of its CVSS score. This creates a low-friction environment for security researchers, encouraging high-volume submission of lower-severity bugs that collectively strengthen your security posture. For example, programs like Google's Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP) often use fixed bounties for well-defined, lower-risk issue types, which streamlines triage and payment processing.

Sliding Scale (CVSS-Based) Rewards take a different approach by directly aligning payout with risk impact. This strategy incentivizes hunters to focus their efforts on finding critical vulnerabilities (e.g., CVSS 9.0+), as the potential reward scales dramatically. This results in a trade-off: while it efficiently allocates budget to the most severe threats, it can demotivate researchers from reporting medium or low-severity issues, potentially leaving coverage gaps. Protocols like Immunefi, which has paid out over $100 million, rely heavily on this model to protect high-value DeFi treasuries.

The key trade-off is between breadth and depth of coverage. If your priority is comprehensive surface hardening and fostering a large, engaged researcher community with a fixed budget, choose Flat-Rate Rewards. This is ideal for mature programs or those in continuous development cycles. If you prioritize mitigating catastrophic financial or reputational risk and need to concentrate expert talent on finding critical flaws in a high-value, live system, choose the Sliding Scale based on CVSS.