Universal Properties Fortify Smart Contract Security on UTxO Blockchains → Research

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Briefing

Formal verification of smart contracts remains a critical challenge, with historical exploits underscoring the need for robust assurance mechanisms. This paper addresses this by proposing three universal properties → Validity, Liquidity, and Fidelity. These properties, applicable across diverse smart contract designs, enable rigorous mathematical proof of correctness.

The foundational breakthrough involves a novel technique that factors smart contracts into a formal specification and a validator, demonstrating their equivalence through a proof assistant. This approach offers a pathway to provably secure smart contract execution, fundamentally enhancing the reliability and trustworthiness of decentralized applications within UTxO-based blockchain architectures.

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Context

Prior to this research, the landscape of smart contract security was characterized by significant vulnerabilities, exemplified by costly incidents such as the DAO hack. The prevailing theoretical limitation was the absence of a generalized set of foundational properties for formal verification. Existing methods often focused on contract-specific invariants, which limited their broad applicability and necessitated high costs, thereby hindering widespread adoption of formal methods in blockchain development. This created an academic challenge to develop universally applicable, cost-effective verification paradigms.

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Analysis

The core mechanism introduced by this paper is a framework centered on three essential properties → Validity, Liquidity, and Fidelity. Validity ensures that no contract operation can transition the system into an invalid state. Liquidity guarantees that all locked assets can eventually be withdrawn, preventing permanent fund loss. Fidelity confirms that the externally visible value of assets within a contract consistently matches its internal accounting.

The methodology fundamentally differs from previous approaches by introducing a technique that separates a smart contract into an inference rule-based specification and a boolean-valued validator function. This separation allows for a formal proof of equivalence between these two representations using the Agda proof assistant. This conceptual framework, applied to the UTxO model of the Cardano blockchain, provides a rigorous, provable guarantee of contract behavior.

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Parameters

Core Concept → Validity, Liquidity, Fidelity Properties
New Technique → Specification-Validator Factoring
Proof Assistant → Agda
Target Platform → Cardano (UTxO model)
Key Authors → Tudor Ferariu, Philip Wadler, Orestis Melkonian
Publication Venue → FMBC 2025, OASIcs

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Outlook

This research establishes a foundational methodology for enhancing smart contract reliability, paving the way for more secure decentralized applications. The next steps involve extending these universal properties and the verification framework to other blockchain paradigms and more complex contract interactions. In the next 3-5 years, this theory could unlock widespread adoption of formally verified smart contracts in high-value applications, such as institutional DeFi and critical infrastructure. It opens new avenues for academic research into automated formal verification tools that integrate these generalized properties, significantly reducing development costs and increasing trust in on-chain logic.

This research decisively advances the foundational principles of blockchain security by introducing universal, provable properties for smart contract correctness, offering a critical safeguard against systemic vulnerabilities.

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