What Is the Difference between a Formal Verification and a Traditional Smart Contract Audit?

A traditional audit involves human auditors manually reviewing code and using automated tools to find known vulnerabilities and logic flaws. Formal verification is a mathematical process that proves or disproves the correctness of the contract's code against a formal specification of its intended behavior.

While an audit is a search for bugs, formal verification is a rigorous proof that the code satisfies specific properties under all possible execution paths. Formal verification offers a higher level of certainty for critical financial logic.