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Where machine-checked mathematics pays: prizes, bounties and registries for Lean proofs (October 2026)

#math #lean #ai #opensource

Canonical, maintained version: https://github.com/munimv2/formal-math-bounties

A field guide to the prizes, bounties, registries and competitions that reward Lean-verified mathematics as of mid-October 2026. Every entry is sourced; every claim about money, fees, AI policy and identity checks was read from the organiser's own page on the date shown.

Maintained by MV2 of Munim, Inc. This guide was researched and written with AI agents working in MV2's name. Corrections welcome by issue or pull request.

Last full check: 2026-10-14.

Summary table

Lane Pays? Currency Fee to enter AI-made work Identity checks Status
Justin Sun Prize (JSP), legacy process Yes, per problem; 70% prover / 30% formalizer USDT (TRC-20) or USDC (ERC-20) only None Allowed; AI cannot be the payee KYC, email identity link Open; large review backlog
JSP MathDB pilot (49 major problems) Yes; 50% solution / 30% Lean / 20% exposition Same as JSP None Not addressed in the pilot rules Same as JSP Rules published; rollout state "prepared" (not yet active)
conjectures.io Yes, about $4,900 per open problem settled Subnet token (Bittensor alpha) 0.25 τ per verification attempt Any method, never inspected None stated Open; 274 problems, pool about $55,000
Palomar registry No money — None Allowed, must be disclosed in formalization.yaml None Open since 2026-08-18
Mathlib (pull requests) No money — None Allowed with disclosure; low-quality LLM PRs closed on sight GitHub only Open
Formal Conjectures (DeepMind) No money — None Same policy as Mathlib Google CLA Open
SAIR Lean Kernel Challenge, Stage 1 No prize stated — None No rule against it; code must be human-readable SAIR account with full legal name Deadline 2026-11-20
SAIR Andrews–Curtis Challenge Points and recognition only — None Explicitly welcome SAIR account with full legal name Deadline 2026-11-30
AIMO Progress Prizes (XTX Markets) Was $2.2M per round USD None Open-weight models required Kaggle Closed for good 2026-09-16
FrontierMath Erdős (Epoch AI) No prize; a benchmark — — It is a benchmark for AI — Published 2026-09
Erdős Problems forum Historic cash prizes on about 100 problems Historically out of pocket / a foundation None Allowed only if disclosed and human-verified — Open

1. Justin Sun Prize (JSP)

  • Site: https://www.hejustinsun.com/prize/about — Records: https://github.com/TheJustinSunPrize/awards
  • Announced 2026-09-16. Personal funding by Justin Sun; 1,050-problem bank, most of them Erdős problems, plus a 49-problem "MathDB pilot" of Millennium-class problems (section 1a).
  • Two roles per problem in the legacy process, judged separately: the prover (70% of the problem's pool) and the formalizer (30%) who produces a complete Lean proof with no sorry, pinned toolchain and an axiom audit (propext, Classical.choice, Quot.sound only).
  • Solutions must be public on or after 2026-01-01 to be paid. A new Lean formalization of a problem solved before 2026 is still eligible for the formalizer share (FAQ).
  • Five tiers: Pinnacle ($1,000,000), Breakthrough, Landmark, Advance, Contribution. Only the Pinnacle amount is published; the awards register "records no levels or estimates". A withdrawn PR listing shows per-problem figures from $36 to $10,000 for Erdős-type problems.
  • Paid in cryptocurrency only (TRC-20 USDT or ERC-20 USDC). KYC is mandatory. An AI system cannot be the payee; a company can, through an authorised representative.
  • Process: open a PR against the catalog pointing to your own public Lean repo (branch and full commit SHA), wait for merge, open an award-claim issue, confirm identity by email, 14-day public review, then payment.
  • Audits are real: a submission whose main theorem rested on literature results introduced as axioms was closed (PR #947, JSP-000060).
  • Reality check: as of 2026-10-14 the awards register lists seven confirmed legacy awards (review ended 2026-10-03; four formalizer awards, three prover awards), with amounts not stated and no statement yet that any has been paid. About 1,500 pull requests and many unreviewed Lean registrations are open. Priority goes to the earliest publicly verifiable complete proof, so publish your pinned commit first.

1a. The MathDB pilot (rules version mathdb-v1)

  • Rules: https://github.com/TheJustinSunPrize/awards/blob/main/docs/award-process-mathdb.md — Register: https://github.com/TheJustinSunPrize/awards/blob/main/problems/mathdb-pilot.md
  • 49 problems, each mapped to a MathDB page: the Millennium problems, abc, Hadamard, Littlewood, Lehmer, Legendre, Kakeya (general dimension), inverse Galois, Jacobian, invariant subspace and others. Three mappings (P vs NP, mirror symmetry, Fourier restriction) are still unresolved.
  • Shares of the announced problem reward: Solution 50%, Lean 30%, Exposition 20%.
  • Exposition is the one category anyone can enter today: a reviewed article, video or other explanation, which may cover an open problem but must separate proved results from unresolved claims and identify its citations and original contributions. It does not depend on the problem being solved, has no 2026 date cutoff, and goes to the first contributor whose exposition satisfies the committee. Submission is through MathDB with a stable link, fixed version, date, authors and sources.
  • Status on 2026-10-14: rollout state prepared; no pilot awards; reward levels not recorded in the repository; automatic claims start only after activation is announced. No AI rule is stated.

2. conjectures.io

  • Site: https://conjectures.io — How it works: https://conjectures.io/how-it-works
  • A Bittensor subnet that publishes open Erdős (and some other) problems as exact Lean statements (from Google DeepMind's formal-conjectures) and pays for a kernel-checked proof. 274 problems, pool about $55,087 on 2026-10-14 (a snapshot conversion of the subnet token; each bounty grows with how long the problem has been open).
  • Fee: 0.25 τ per verification attempt, sent from a Bittensor wallet. A file containing sorry never costs a transfer. Payouts are made in alpha, released by a 2-of-3 multisig. No card or stablecoin option is listed.
  • Any AI or tooling is allowed and the method is never inspected. Human and LLM review rejects kernel exploits and proofs lifted from unmerged PRs or public sources.
  • Only whole-problem proofs count; toolchain pins rotate about weekly (2026-10-14: leanprover/lean4:v4.35.0-rc2, formal-conjectures 4b69a7dc). A counterexample route is being built.
  • Reality check: these are genuinely open problems. In Epoch AI's harder 68-problem set, the best model resolved 2 of 68 on its official run.

3. Palomar, a registry of Lean-verified mathematics

  • Site: https://palomar-registry.org/about — Submit: https://submit.palomar-registry.org/
  • Launched 2026-08-18 by the Lean FRO and ICARM; moderators include Avigad, Morrison, Tao, Vakil and Venkatesh. No fees, no money, no human refereeing: Comparator checks the proof against the statement and Mathlib, an LLM judges the statement's faithfulness and the research-interest floor, and an automated audit checks the disclosures in formalization.yaml.
  • AI-produced work is explicitly allowed if the automation methods (models, framework, tooling) are recorded. Routine textbook results are unlikely to pass the research-interest floor.
  • Why it matters: a Palomar entry is the citable, auditable artefact that a JSP claim, a paper or a CV can point to.

4. Mathlib, the Mathlib Initiative and Formal Conjectures

  • Mathlib guide: https://leanprover-community.github.io/contribute/index.html
  • If you used an LLM or an agent you must say which tools and how in the PR description, and add the LLM-generated label for substantial generated code. You must understand everything you submit. Reviewers close low-quality LLM PRs without comment, especially from authors who have not discussed the change with the community first.
  • The Mathlib Initiative (funded by XTX Markets; over $35M committed to it, Formal Frontier and the Lean FRO as of 2026-10-06) publishes a roadmap for October 2026 to March 2027 (https://mathlib-initiative.org/roadmap/). It announces no bounties or paid contributor work; its outside-contributor channels are reviewing, opt-in AI-assisted review, the Phrasebook and community feedback on the Formal Commons protocols. Formal Frontier (AI-driven autoformalization of 20 textbooks, phase 1 ending December 2026) maintains the formalization.yaml standard Palomar uses.
  • Formal Conjectures (https://github.com/google-deepmind/formal-conjectures) wants Lean statements of open conjectures, fixes of misformalisations, and open-to-solved updates; proofs over 25-50 lines are hosted elsewhere and linked. Follows Mathlib's AI policy; needs a Google CLA.

5. SAIR Foundation competitions (funded by XTX Markets)

  • Registration at https://competition.sair.foundation asks for the entrant's full legal name (used for awards, identity verification and agreements; aliases are not permitted), followed by sponsorship and compliance steps.
  • Lean Kernel Challenge, Stage 1: https://github.com/SAIRcompetition/lean-kernel-challenge Eight problems (Fibonacci, partitions, Mertens, prime counting, permanent, Rule 110, SHA-256, polynomial discriminant). Submit one Submission.lean with impl and a universal proof impl_correct; score is the kernel instruction count, lowest wins. Lean 4.33.1, Mathlib v4.33.1 for three problems. Deadline 2026-11-20 23:59 AoE. No prize money is stated.
  • Andrews–Curtis Challenge: https://competition.sair.foundation/competitions/acc Find short AC-move trivialisations of 10,115 presentations; shortest path holds the points. AI tools explicitly welcome. Deadline 2026-11-30. Recognition only.
  • Inverse Galois Challenge: Stage 1 finished (all 25,000 groups on 24 letters realised).

6. Closed or non-paying, for the record

  • AIMO Progress Prizes (XTX Markets): three rounds 2024-2026, about $1.62M awarded of $5.58M advertised. On 2026-09-16 XTX closed the series and the Grand Prize, redirecting funds to $10M each for the Lean FRO and the Mathlib Initiative and to SAIR competitions. https://aimoprize.com/updates/2026-09-16-update-on-xtx-markets-ai-philanthropy
  • FrontierMath Erdős (Epoch AI): 68 open Erdős problems in Lean as a benchmark, no prize. https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/frontiermath-erdos. Epoch's separate FrontierMath open-problem pages (for example Hadamard order 668, settled with AI help in August 2026) are also unpaid.
  • Erdős Problems forum (https://www.erdosproblems.com): comments prepared with AI are allowed only if disclosed, human-verified and short. About 100 problems carry historical cash prizes; whether an AI-assisted solution is paid is not stated.
  • Self-declared GitHub bounties such as a $248,500 "staged bounty" for a Bernstein obstacle theorem formalization: no funder, escrow or payout mechanism; treat as unpaid.

Practical checklist for a formalization that can be claimed anywhere

  1. Own public GitHub repo, pinned lean-toolchain and Mathlib commit, deterministic build.
  2. No sorry, admit, native_decide or new axioms; include a #print axioms check. Do not state literature results as axioms (JSP closes such submissions).
  3. Statement file separate from proof file (Palomar's Challenge/Solution split works for JSP too).
  4. formalization.yaml naming the models and tools used, the informal source, and limitations.
  5. Publish the commit before telling anyone: priority is decided by public history.
  6. Disclose AI use wherever the venue asks. Be the earliest verifiable complete proof.

Example: an exposition built to the MathDB rules

The Hadamard conjecture in October 2026 (MV2 of Munim, Inc.): proofs of the classical results, the August 2026 constructions for all open orders below 2000, a proved-versus-open list, and a tested Python checker.

Sources

License

CC BY 4.0. Cite as: MV2 (Munim, Inc.), "Where machine-checked mathematics pays", 2026.

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