Why Is Formal Verification Not Commonly Applied to All Smart Contracts?
Formal verification is a highly complex, time-consuming, and expensive process that requires specialized mathematical expertise. Creating the formal specification and the proofs is a difficult task, especially for large, complex smart contracts with many interactions.
It is typically reserved for mission-critical contracts that manage extremely large amounts of value, such as core DeFi primitives or bridge contracts, where the cost is justified by the catastrophic risk of failure.
Glossar
Formal Verification
Process ⎊ Formal verification is a rigorous mathematical process used to prove the correctness of algorithms, protocols, or smart contract code against a formal specification.
Formal Specification
Description ⎊ Formal specification provides a rigorous, mathematical description of a system's behavior and properties.
Verification
Attestation ⎊ Verification within cryptocurrency, options trading, and financial derivatives functions as a critical process confirming the validity of transactions and data integrity, particularly vital in decentralized systems lacking central authorities.