Justin Sun announced the establishment of the Justin Sun Prize, a $1 million academic bounty mechanism based on zero-trust, decentralized principles. According to reports from The Office of Justin Sun, the prize operates as a problem-list system where breakthroughs in fundamental disciplines and machine formal verification serve as criteria for awarding prizes. The initiative treats human and AI-generated proofs equally, with no distinction made between the two. The prize structure includes Pinnacle problems carrying $1 million rewards each, while lower-tier problems presumably offer smaller amounts. Winners are chosen across two distinct categories: prover (who solves the problem) and formalizer (who converts the proof into computer-verifiable code). The sequential verification process ensures community acceptance first, formal code conversion second, machine verification third, and payment last, maintaining human review as a meaningful checkpoint even in an AI-open system.
OpenAI has rejected Justin Sun's $1 million mathematics prize for the same Navier-Stokes equations problem that it previously solved for the Clay Mathematics Institute. According to The Office of Justin Sun, the prize was awarded to the OpenAI research team for solving the Existence and Smoothness of the Three-Dimensional Navier–Stokes Equations problem, with the proof produced by OpenAI's internal model, Lean formalization and verification completed by GPT-6 Astra. OpenAI published its proof on September 8, stating that 10,000 AI agents worked the problem for 88 hours before a separate model spent another 17 hours checking the logic. However, the company has left both prizes unclaimed, just as it did with an identical prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute weeks earlier. The rejection highlights growing concerns about AI's role in mathematical research, with two mathematicians claiming their unpublished research was incorporated into OpenAI's work, a claim the company denies.
The current problem list includes formal verification of the Poincaré Conjecture, Riemann Hypothesis, Goldbach's Conjecture, and numerous unsolved problems proposed during the lifetime of mathematician and Wolf Prize laureate Paul Erdős. According to The Office of Justin Sun, the prize adheres to three core principles: openness, public benefit, and open source. The problem list, confirmation standards, proofs, and verification materials are made available to the public through GitHub, while prize disbursement records are recorded on-chain for permanent traceability and immutability. Prize funds will be deposited on a blockchain with public records of every proof and payment made available for auditing without relying on internal company books.
Justin Sun stated that the prize represents his commitment to returning wealth created through mathematics and technology back to mathematics itself. As reported by The Office of Justin Sun, Sun has donated more than $45 million across technology, environmental protection, disaster relief, and other fields. The prize will be paid out in either USDT on TRON (TRC-20) or USDC on Ethereum (ERC-20) based on recipient preference. Winners receive certificates, medals, and the Latin phrase "Quod probatur, solvitur" inscribed on the medal edge, meaning "Proved, then paid." However, the mathematics community has grown increasingly guarded about sharing unpublished work, with some researchers describing the field as "very unstable" and warning that "all the open maths problems could fall with enough resources." Prof Alexander Paseau of the University of Oxford noted that "the sheer enjoyment and the beauty of a mathematical proof will always be there," while Prof Tristan Buckmaster of New York University expressed concerns about sharing unfinished work, stating "the big story now in mathematics is that nobody wants to share anything."
