Comparing Solidity and Move Formal Verification for Enhanced Smart Contract Security → Research

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Briefing

Smart contract security is paramount, yet formal verification → a critical method for ensuring correctness → is challenging, especially for languages like Solidity with complex semantics. This paper conducts a comparative analysis between Solidity and Move, demonstrating that Move’s design, inherently focused on security and verifiability, significantly streamlines formal verification processes compared to Solidity’s “semantical quirks.” This highlights the profound impact of language design on the practicality and effectiveness of formal methods. This research provides crucial insights for designing future blockchain languages and protocols, emphasizing that intrinsic language properties are key to achieving provably secure and reliable decentralized applications.

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Context

Before this research, the field recognized formal verification’s potential for smart contracts but grappled with its practical application due to the complexity and specific semantic challenges of languages like Solidity. The prevailing theoretical limitation centered on the difficulty of achieving comprehensive, scalable, and developer-friendly formal verification for existing contract platforms, often leading to a trade-off between expressive power and verifiability.

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Analysis

The core idea is a systematic comparison of how formal verification tools operate and perform across two distinct smart contract programming paradigms → Solidity and Move. Solidity, designed for Ethereum, presents “semantical quirks” that complicate formal analysis, requiring sophisticated tools like Certora to navigate its intricacies. In contrast, Move, purpose-built for blockchain, incorporates security and verifiability into its fundamental design, allowing its dedicated tool, the Move Prover, to achieve more reliable and efficient verification. The paper conceptually illustrates that language features, such as Move’s resource types and ownership model, intrinsically simplify the creation of formal specifications and proofs, fundamentally differing from Solidity’s more general-purpose, object-oriented approach.

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Parameters

Core Concept → Formal Verification Comparative Analysis
Languages Analyzed → Solidity, Move
Verification Tools → Certora, Move Prover
Key Finding → Language design impacts verification efficacy
Publication Date → February 19, 2025
Source → arXiv

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Outlook

This research opens new avenues for designing future blockchain programming languages, emphasizing that integrating formal verifiability from the outset can lead to more secure and robust smart contract ecosystems. Future work will likely involve extending these comparative analyses to other emerging smart contract languages, developing new verification techniques tailored to specific language features, and integrating these insights into automated development pipelines. The potential real-world application lies in enabling a new generation of smart contracts with provable security guarantees, significantly reducing vulnerabilities and fostering greater trust in decentralized applications within the next 3-5 years.

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Verdict

This comparative analysis fundamentally clarifies that smart contract language design is a critical determinant of formal verification practicality, establishing a foundational principle for future secure blockchain development.

Signal Acquired from → arxiv.org