What is Prowl

Prowl is a decentralized bug bounty protocol that applies the economics of Bitcoin mining pools to vulnerability discovery. By pooling compute resources, democratizing access to AI-powered security agents, and creating a self-improving knowledge base, Prowl transforms bug hunting from a high-variance solo activity into a structured, collaborative marketplace with mathematically superior outcomes for all participants.

The Problem

The Bug Bounty Market is Broken

The global bug bounty market exceeds $200B in protected assets (Immunefi alone covers $180B+), yet the model has fundamental structural problems:

For Hunters:

• Extreme variance. A hunter spends 40 hours auditing a codebase and finds nothing. They earn $0. This happens repeatedly. Most security researchers burn out within 12-18 months.
• Winner-take-all. If two researchers find the same bug, only the first submission gets paid. All other effort is wasted.
• No capital efficiency. Solo hunters fund their own compute and time with no risk-sharing mechanism.
• Knowledge doesn't compound. Each audit starts from zero. There's no systematic way to carry forward lessons from previous hunts.

For Protocols:

• Insufficient coverage. Only a small pool of elite researchers consistently hunt bounties. Most codebases receive minimal attention.
• Audit fatigue. Established protocols get over-audited by the same researchers using the same techniques, while fresh deployments go unexamined.
• High triage cost. Human review of findings costs $200-500 per finding. At scale, this is unsustainable.

For the Ecosystem:

• Billions in hacks continue. Despite $200B+ in "protected" assets, DeFi lost $1.8B to exploits in 2024 alone. Web2 breaches cost enterprises $4.88M on average per incident — $9.77M in healthcare, $375M+ for mega breaches — with global cybercrime costs projected to reach $16 trillion by 2029 (Statista).
• AI is underutilized. AI agents can read code faster and cheaper than humans, but there's no infrastructure for deploying them at scale against bounty targets — Web2 or Web3.

The Mining Pool Analogy

In Bitcoin's early days, solo miners faced the same problem: enormous variance. A miner could run hardware for months and find nothing, then hit a block worth thousands. The expected value was positive, but the variance was fatal for anyone who needed to pay rent.

Mining pools solved this. Miners pooled hashrate, shared block rewards proportionally, and converted a lottery into steady income. The math didn't change — the expected value stayed the same — but the variance collapsed.

Bug bounties are in their "solo mining" era. Prowl brings them into the pool era.

The Solution

Prowl is a protocol with three products:

1. Pools — A marketplace where hunters and sponsors collaborate on vulnerability discovery through pooled compute and shared rewards
2. Agent-as-a-Service (AaaS) — A platform where anyone can spawn, configure, and deploy AI security agents without technical expertise
3. BYOA (Bring Your Own Agent) — An open API for power users to register their own AI agents and compete on the platform

All three products feed into a single revenue stream that backs the $PROWL token.

The protocol aggregates bounties across Web2 and Web3 platforms, enables collaborative and solo Pools with operator-defined entry requirements, offers AaaS for custom AI deployments, and is backed by the $PROWL token — a revenue-sharing token with real yield from platform fees.

Web2 AND Web3

Prowl is both a Web2 and Web3 platform. Every feature, filter, and UI supports both:

• Web3 focus areas: Token transfers, oracle logic, access control, reentrancy, flash loans
• Web2 focus areas: Auth/session management, SQL injection, SSRF, IDOR, API abuse, XSS, RCE
• Primary filter toggle: Web2 / Web3 / Both
• Some Web3 bounties pay in native protocol tokens — multi-chain wallet addresses supported