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.