Formal verification? What is it? Learn more đ§”
Trillions of dollars sit in blockchains. One consensus bug = instant drain. Testing can find bugs but canât prove theyâre impossible. Formal verification for DAG-based protocols changes that game.
Formal verification models a protocol as a state machine and lets a prover exhaustively check every transitionânot just a test sample.
The hard part? Proofs are slow to write. Sonicâs insight: break protocols into reusable building blocks instead of reinventing proofs each time.
Sonic Labs just open-sourced a TLA+ library that mathematically proves safety for DAG-Rider, Hashgraph, Bullshark, Aleph & moreâno paywall, no NDAs.
Dijkstra: âProgram testing can show the presence of bugs, but never their absence.â Proofs give you the absence part.
The library splits things in two:
ââą DAG construction đł
ââą Ordering / leader election đłïž
Each block has its own spec + machine-checked proof.
It took ~14 person-months across 5 researchers to model 5 protocols. Adding a 6th now takes days, not months.
The work debuted at NASA Formal Methods 2025. If itâs robust enough for rockets, itâs probably good for Sonic!
Caveat: these proofs cover safety (no forks, no double spends). They donât fix liveness or economic attacksâbut wiping out entire classes of safety bugs is still a huge win.
TL;DR â Audit checklists are 2020. Composable, open-source proofs are 2025. Letâs make âprovably safeâ the default in crypto.
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