Formal verification is an effective technique for ensuring DeFi security. It assists humans in finding bugs before the code is deployed and can formally prove many program invariants. Formal verification is particularly relevant in the domain of smart contracts where vulnerabilities in the code can lead to severe financial losses. In this talk, we will show how a formal verification tool we have built, called the Certora Prover, can be used to prove high-level properties of Solidity smart contracts. The Certora Prover has already secured billions of dollars by verifying millions of lines of Solidity code. One of the most important steps in formal verification is writing a good specification against which the program is verified. Writing good specifications can be challenging and may cause the results of formal verification to lead to false beliefs about software correctness. This talk will also present a new mutation-based tool, dubbed Gambit, for strengthening the quality of formal specifications and therefore gaining trust in the result of formal verification. We show cases where mutations can find missing parts of the specifications. Chandra Nandi Infrastructure + Scalability Stage ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6WXU3p5Nbs

Since the rise of Ethereum in 2016, the blockchain community has been grasping for successful use cases beyond the financial world. Meanwhile, social media is clearly ripe for disruption via the theoretical promises that web3 delivers. A collision is inevitable – But so far, the Web3 solutions on the market have failed to deliver. We’ve seen many nearly-cloned-but-subpar experiences of existing social sites that people are already used to engaging with every day, with added inconveniences of having to pay for every user interaction and vague promises of better creator monetization or data ownership. We know that Web3 has the potential to upend the social media paradigm. But instead of cloning existing social media applications as “web3 versions of X”, creators need to introduce novel solutions with the best of what decentralized networks can enable. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GDufHFiqjY