Formal verification is no longer optional
Formal verification is no longer optional.
Vitalik Buterin. Morpho. The White House. DARPA. The AMF.
Five independent voices. One conclusion: formal verification is essential to software and blockchain security. Every quote below is dated, sourced, and linked to the original document.
On the record
The genius behind Ethereum
$200B+ market cap. 1M+ daily transactions. ~12,000 monthly active developers.
Vitalik Buterin is arguably the most emblematic mind in blockchain.
So when he states formal verification of everything for security
, he is not simply
endorsing a technology.
He is defining the security standard for Ethereum.
- Formal verification of everything for security.
- FV also makes us much more comfortable with canonicalization (having pieces of the protocol that are directly defined as a piece of bytecode expressed in some language).
evm-asmis being written in part to become a canonical proof system for the EVM.
A shallow dive into formal verification
“Bugs in computer code become more scary when you put cryptocurrency into immutable onchain smart contracts from which North Korea can automatically drain all your money with no recourse if there’s a bug in the code.”
One application of AI that I am excited about is AI-assisted formal verification of code and bug finding. Right now ethereum's biggest technical risk probably is bugs in code, and anything that could significantly change the game on that would be amazing.
Many people have claimed that with AI-assisted bug finding, secure code (and hence trustless anything) will be impossible. I have a much more optimistic take, and AI-assisted formal verification is a major part of the reason why: vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/05/18/fv.html
If you formally verify end-to-end, then you are proving not just that some description of the protocol is secure in theory, but that the specific piece of code that the user runs is secure in practice.
Formal verification is not a panacea. But it is particularly well-suited for situations where the goal is much simpler than the implementation.
If done right, this has potential to both output extremely efficient code, and be far more secure than the way programming has been done before.
The rising star of DeFi
$11B+ in deposits. $175M raised. Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, Galaxy and Anchorage among its institutional integrations.
Morpho is building what is set to become the world's leading infrastructure for automated onchain finance.
Formal verification uses mathematical methods to prove that a smart contract satisfies certain properties for every possible input, not just the ones a tester thinks to try.
At Morpho, ownership of formal verification is internal. The engineers designing and developing the protocol also work on formal verification, ensuring that they have all the required context.
All Morpho smart contracts are immutable and non-upgradable. Once deployed, no one can upgrade, pause, or alter them.
The highest authorities in cybersecurity
The White House and DARPA: the U.S. presidency and the agency behind the foundations of the internet.
Their conclusion is unequivocal: in the age of AI-driven attacks, testing is not enough. Critical software requires formal verification.
The White House
Office of the National Cyber Director, Executive Office of the President of the United States
While formal methods have been studied for decades, their deployment remains limited; further innovation in approaches to make formal methods widely accessible is vital to accelerate broad adoption.
Given the complexities of code, testing is a necessary but insufficient step in the development process to fully reduce vulnerabilities at scale. If correctness is defined as the ability of a piece of software to meet a specific security requirement, then it is possible to demonstrate correctness using mathematical techniques called formal methods.
They allow for proving the presence of an affirmative requirement, rather than testing for the absence of a negative condition.
As questions arise about the safety or trustworthiness of a new software product, formal methods can accelerate market adoption in ways that traditional software testing methods cannot.
With formal methods, we can generate a mathematical proof that offers that level of assurance, giving technology developers another powerful capability in their arsenal that provides greater certainty that entire classes of vulnerabilities are absent.
DARPA
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, U.S. Department of Defense
expMath Exponentiating Mathematics
Information Processing Techniques Office · darpa.mil
“In theory, formalization in programming languages, such as Lean, could help automate proofs, but translation from math to code and back remains exceedingly difficult.”
- Program manager
- Patrick Shafto
- Kickoff
- March 2025, Arlington, Virginia
- Convened
- More than 130 attendees, including Fields medalists, Turing Award winners, and experts in mathematics and AI
- Stated goal
- To “radically accelerate the rate of progress” in pure mathematics by developing an AI co-author capable of proposing and proving useful abstractions
Nothing works better than formal methods when it comes to cyber-hardening. Like other engineering disciplines, using a mathematically based development process to create proof that software does what it is supposed to and does not do what it is not supposed to implies someone cannot hack it.
Rather than validate the security of software code solely by testing it after it’s already written, formal methods’ mathematically based software development approach designs software through rigorous mathematical analysis, verifying its performance before and as it’s being built.
The growing role of DOD software in warfighting, in the protection of national assets, and the safeguarding of human lives creates a diminishing tolerance for faulty assurance judgments.
The formal method-generated code foiled all Red Team attempts to crack the Little Bird’s defenses. […] To this day, the system has yet to be successfully hacked.
The financial regulators
Under the aegis of the AMF and ACPR, a working group bringing together auditors, scientists, banks, protocols and Dowsers examined how smart contracts should be certified as onchain finance scales under MiCA.
The conclusion was clear: formal verification offers, by far, the greatest level of assurance, with the strongest potential to scale.
AMF & ACPR
The AMF and ACPR are France’s main financial regulators, with the ACPR operating under the aegis of the Banque de France while the AMF is an independent public authority.
Compared with static or dynamic analyses, formal verification is much more ambitious: it aims at demonstrating compliance with the specifications in a logical-mathematical sense.
The potential of formal verification methods lies in their capacity to be automated, which in theory can allow for unrestricted scaling.
Formal verification methods, on the other hand, are ideal for assessing whether the smart contract code satisfies the “compliance principles”, and in particular for checking that the program actually performs the expected operations.
Formal methods have so far been mainly used for developing algorithms in critical areas, involving the safety of people, such as the transport or nuclear industry.
Certification would be obtained following an auditing process performed by a human expert, or using formal methods or a combination of these methods.
They set the standard.
Dowsers turns it into reality.
Dowsers brings formal verification, the mathematical technology trusted in nuclear, space, railway and aeronautics engineering, to smart contracts and blockchain infrastructure.
Code Maths is law