Justin Sun Award Confirms First Batch of Winners, $10 Million Prize Pool Begins Payout

On October 4, the Justin Sun Prize operators announced that the 14-day public notice period for the award candidates associated with questions No. 305, 371, 381, 526, 866, and 1001 in the problem set had officially concluded. The operators stated that no unresolved objections arose during the public notice period, and the qualifications of the relevant winners have completed final review, formally entering the first batch of written confirmation and prize distribution procedures. This is the first time a complete public notice closed loop has been completed since the prize was established, marking that the world's first zero-trust, decentralized academic bounty mechanism based on a "problem list" has now entered the stage of substantive redemption.

According to previously published notice information, the final confirmed winners this time cover the formal verifiers for questions No. 305, 371, and 381, the mathematical solvers for questions No. 866 and 1001, and the dual role of solver and formalizer for question No. 526. This information was publicly available throughout the public notice period on the official GitHub candidate registration form. Winners can complete written confirmation via the official email, supplement payment and mailing information, and prizes will be distributed in USDT (TRC20) or USDC (ERC20).

At the same time, the award candidates who solved questions No. 239 and 327 in the problem set also entered the public notice period on September 30, which is still ongoing. As the qualifications of prize claimants continue to be confirmed, more candidate winners will enter the public notice and award confirmation process.

The Justin Sun Prize was officially established by Justin Sun, founder of TRON, on September 16 of this year, aiming to recognize contributors to major breakthroughs in fundamental disciplines and machine formal verification, with the highest single-question prize reaching $1 million. On the day of its establishment, the first batch of recognition list was also announced, involving 66 mathematical problems, among which the highest prize of $1 million was awarded to the OpenAI research team for completing the solution to the "Existence and Smoothness of the Three-Dimensional Navier–Stokes Equations" and its Lean formal proof. On September 22, the prize operators published the prize pool's on-chain address, which has been deposited with $10 million. The prize operators stated that reward distribution records will also be stored on-chain for permanent traceability.

According to the rules of the Justin Sun Prize, the prize only accepts complete mathematical solutions and complete Lean proofs for the original problems, and the reward is granted to the first person to complete the listed problems. Solvers receive 70% of the total prize, formal verifiers receive 30%, and a person who completes both can receive the full prize. The prize covers mathematical progress achieved since January 1, 2026. The entire process is handled through GitHub contribution PRs (Pull Requests), claim issues, and the official email. The prize operators once again remind that they will not ask reward claimants for account passwords, private keys, or mnemonic phrases, nor will they require transfers to any address to activate prizes.

When establishing the prize, Justin Sun said, "The prize follows the problem, not the person. It does not wait for annual conferences, nominations, or age." The confirmation of award eligibility lies in "the machine verifying the proof from the first line to the last, without a single step missing." He also pointed out that his personal wealth came from mathematics, and this wealth will also return to mathematics. In the future, his philanthropy will shift its focus to the Justin Sun Prize, "this is the one thing among all I can do for humanity to which I can contribute the most." Justin Sun emphasized that with the development of artificial intelligence, mathematics is entering a different era, "people who formalize have never lacked passion; what they lack is a construction blueprint with a price tag."

It is reported that the Justin Sun Prize adheres to the principles of openness, public welfare, and open source, and is open to all contributors, with no restrictions based on nationality, institution, or identity, and no distinction between humans and AI. The current problem set has collected 1,022 problems, including the formal verification of the Poincaré conjecture, the Riemann hypothesis, the Goldbach conjecture, and a large number of unsolved Erdős problems. The problem list, confirmation standards, proofs, and verification materials are all open to the public through GitHub, and once the problem list is posted, it is permanently locked, only increasing and never decreasing, and prizes are only redeemed and never refunded.

Justin Sun also previously said, "The list is the only answer. I do not require anyone to believe now. The Justin Sun Prize can afford to wait." This concept is now being implemented through the final confirmation and redemption of the first batch of results. The prize operators stated that they welcome global researchers, independent enthusiasts, and human-machine collaboration teams to continue following the official GitHub and official website, participate in subsequent verification and applications, and jointly promote accelerated breakthroughs in fundamental science in the AI era.