Later in 2013, a young Bitcoin developer crashed on my couch for a couple of weeks while visiting San Francisco. In the afternoon, he would come to the Ripple office and join our discussions about smart contracts. His name was Vitalik Buterin. And these conversations
People often ask why we didn’t release our prototype, preempting Ethereum and potentially attracting developers to XRP instead. At the time, we underestimated the amount of interest there would be in smart contracts. Moreover, building this architecture seemed daunting — hats off to Vitalik and friends for attracting a community large enough and fervent enough to pull it off.
We’ve received a great deal of feedback since we announced that Sagewise would work with Hedera Hashgraph. In response, we want to go into a little more detail here about the specifics of the collaboration and what it does and does not mean for Sagewise’s own roadmap. First of all, we want to reiterate how excited we are to be working with the Hedera Hashgraph team. They’re building an exciting platform and we look forward to being part of their exciting growth in the future.
We also want to address some questions and concerns that have been raised by the community. Most importantly, we want to emphasize that working with Hedera Hashgraph does not mean we are leaving Ethereum. We recognize both the technological advantages and the broad reach of the Ethereum blockchain — it’s one of the reasons we decided to build our platform on it in the first place. On the contrary, Hedera Hashgraph, for a number of reasons that we will outline, is completely compatible with our work on Ethereum. At the same time, it offers additional benefits that we believe will materially advance our efforts to build the industry’s leading smart contract dispute resolution system.
Mooly Sagiv, Certora
https://www.meetup.com/EthereumSiliconValley/events/254621281/
http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~msagiv/IVY: Interactive Safety Verification via Counterexample Generalization Oded Padon, Kenneth McMillan, Aurojit Panda, Mooly Sagiv, Sharon Shoham. To appear PLDI 2016.
New Directions for Network Verification Aurojit Panda, Katerina Argyraki, Mooly Sagiv, Michael Schapira, Scott Shenker
Mooly Sagiv is a professor in the School of Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University and a visiting scholar at VMware Research Group. Sagiv is a recipient of the most prestigious European grant given by the European Research Council (Senior ERC). Eric Smith is a Senior Computer Scientist at Kestrel Institute where he co-leads Kestrel's Automated Program Transformations project, which is used in the ACL2 model of an Ethereum client that the Ethereum Foundation funded with $400k [1][2]. See below for talk abstracts and bios. This will be a great event; join us!
Professor Sagiv will speak on "
Certora's exact and automatic formal verification of smart contracts"; his abstract follows. "The dream of trustless transactions on blockchains has only been partially achieved. One of the worst gaps is the need to trust code, especially smart contracts. True transparency cannot be achieved even by disclosing full source code, because subtle bugs and vulnerabilities in plain sight slip through careful inspection and testing. Breathtaking financial losses from exploited bugs in smart contracts, such as the DAO and Parity hacks, demonstrate this point. Bugs in smart contracts may be the most important limiting factor to mainstream adoption of blockchain technology."
"Certora aim to create a safe haven in a world of buggy, insecure, and malicious contracts by applying recent advances in formal verification research that enable automatic, exact analysis. Our goal is to prove that smart contracts satisfy critical logical properties, routinely and automatically, with no false error reports and no missed errors. Furthermore, we will enable continuous checking after contracts are deployed to provide up-to-the minute security, tracking new vulnerabilities and upgrades to contracts."
Shelly Grossman
School of Computer Science
Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences
Tel Aviv University
https://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~shellygr/
Online Detection of Effectively Callback Free Objects with Applications to Smart Contracts [pdf]
Shelly Grossman, Ittai Abraham, Guy Golan-Gueta, Yan Michalevsky, Noam Rinetzky, Mooly Sagiv, and Yoni Zohar.
POPL 2018: 45th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages.
©CC
Online Detection of Effectively Callback Free Objects with Applications to Smart Contracts [pdf]
Shelly Grossman, Ittai Abraham, Guy Golan-Gueta, Yan Michalevsky, Noam Rinetzky, Mooly Sagiv, and Yoni Zohar.
Technical Report, School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, January 2018.
