An hour ago, Vlad Tenev said something: within two years, all code will be formally verified.
To outsiders, it sounds like tech-industry talk. Formal verification is an old tool in aerospace and chipmaking. A team might spend months tackling just a small piece of code, and the cost has been so high that nobody wanted to use it for commercial software. Now large models can write proofs alongside the code, leaving humans with only the final check. Suddenly, the numbers add up.
What’s really being rewritten is the source of trust. In the past, to judge whether a platform was reliable, you looked at its licenses, its audit reports, and whether it paid out after something went wrong. Going forward, that won’t be enough. The code itself will need to provide proof that it actually runs as written.
On-chain assets have worked this way from day one: the rules are written into contracts and publicly verifiable. That chain, $BTC , has run without interruption for seventeen years, thanks to its simplicity and verifiability. If traditional finance also starts requiring machine-readable proofs, the two sides will finally be speaking the same language.
When verification truly becomes an industry standard, what will platforms that rely on complex structures to tell their stories have left to say?
To outsiders, it sounds like tech-industry talk. Formal verification is an old tool in aerospace and chipmaking. A team might spend months tackling just a small piece of code, and the cost has been so high that nobody wanted to use it for commercial software. Now large models can write proofs alongside the code, leaving humans with only the final check. Suddenly, the numbers add up.
What’s really being rewritten is the source of trust. In the past, to judge whether a platform was reliable, you looked at its licenses, its audit reports, and whether it paid out after something went wrong. Going forward, that won’t be enough. The code itself will need to provide proof that it actually runs as written.
On-chain assets have worked this way from day one: the rules are written into contracts and publicly verifiable. That chain, $BTC , has run without interruption for seventeen years, thanks to its simplicity and verifiability. If traditional finance also starts requiring machine-readable proofs, the two sides will finally be speaking the same language.
When verification truly becomes an industry standard, what will platforms that rely on complex structures to tell their stories have left to say?
