A Payment Platform for Security Researchers—No Bug Bounty Program Required

A researcher emails your security team a valid, critical vulnerability report. Or it lands through a Google Form on your site. Or someone flags it on a platform you don't even run a program on. You want to pay them—it's the right thing to do, and it's how you keep good researchers reporting to you instead of somewhere else. But you don't run a bug bounty program, and you don't want to build one just to send one payment.

That's the gap HackenProof's payment platform closes: a way to pay a security researcher for a report you already have, legally and quickly, without standing up a program around it.

The Problem: Rewarding Researchers Isn't As Simple As Sending Money

More companies are willing to pay for a good, critical vulnerability report even without a standing bug bounty program. That's a healthy shift. But paying an individual researcher—often overseas, often working under a handle rather than a legal name—isn't a wire transfer away. It's a contract, know-your-customer (KYC) verification, and usually an invoice. Real compliance work, not a formality.

Built in-house, that process pulls in legal and finance, and it can take weeks or months to close out a single payment. For a one-off report, that's a disproportionate amount of time and cost to spend on doing right by a researcher who already did you a favor.

How Are You Paying Security Researchers Right Now?

If you're reading this, you're probably doing it manually: running KYC yourself, drafting or adapting a contract for each case, looping in legal and finance every time, and absorbing the time and cost as a one-off project rather than a repeatable process.

HackenProof proposes the opposite: set it up once, and every future payment reuses the same setup.

How HackenProof Works As A Payment Platform

Sign one agreement. It doesn't matter how the report reached you—email, a form, another platform. Once your company has a Terms of Use agreement with HackenProof, that covers researcher payments going forward, not just the one in front of you.

Deposit funds your way. Fund your HackenProof account in fiat or crypto. Depositing takes minutes.

We take the researcher off your hands. HackenProof checks whether the researcher already has a HackenProof account. If they do, payment moves ahead immediately. If they don't, they register and complete KYC before the payment goes through. Either way, the verification, the payout, and all researcher-facing communication are ours to handle, not yours.

The Process, Step by Step

For the researcher:

1. Does the researcher already have a HackenProof account? If yes, no further steps are needed.
2. If not, they register and complete KYC.
3. Payment proceeds.

For the company:

1. Sign HackenProof's Terms of Use—a one-time step.
2. HackenProof issues an invoice.
3. You deposit funds (fiat or crypto) to your HackenProof account.
4. HackenProof pays the researcher.
5. Next time, there's no new contract to sign, and a returning researcher doesn't need to re-verify.

Why Route Researcher Payments Through HackenProof

Legal footing, without building it yourself. The contract, the invoicing, and the KYC are handled by a platform that's been doing this for nine years—not improvised per payment.

Speed. A process that can take weeks or months to build in-house typically closes in hours the first time you use it—often around a couple of hours—and once your account is funded, later payments move faster still.