Certora Prover Is Now Open Source: A New Era for Multi-Chain Smart Contract Security is Here

The cryptocurrency market is rife with vulnerabilities and security risks, and as the industry matures and more sophisticated players enter the space, it’s more critical than ever to secure smart contracts and protect the growing amount of massive capital locked in them.

Leading Web3 security provider, Certora offers advanced verification tools, smart contract audits, and protocol design reviews to secure these dApps, DeFi, and the overall crypto space.

Trusted by the likes of Aave, Maker, Uniswap, Lido, EigenLayer, Solana, Ethereum Foundation, and Coinbase, Certora is currently protecting over $25 billion through its solutions, which enables protocols to eliminate vulnerabilities before their contracts are deployed.

Most recently, Certora open-sourced its most advanced Formal Verification (FV) engine for Ethereum (EVM), Solana (sBPF), and Stellar (WASM) —  the Certora Prover.

With this move, Certor has officially democratized the security of smart contracts, which are powering hundreds of thousands of innovative, exciting, and futuristic applications. Developers can now secure their code with an industrial-grade tool that is free, transparent, and community-driven.

Making Security Accessible to All Builders

Over the past decade, the cryptocurrency space has evolved significantly, but the ethos of the industry remains the same. These values that guide the development of cryptocurrencies include open source, which simply means the underlying code of a protocol is publicly accessible.

An open-source code is available for anyone to review and improve, hence fostering not just transparency but also collaboration and a decentralized approach to development. Bitcoin is entirely open source, and now so is the Certora Prover, meaning its code is freely available for anyone to inspect and modify.

Besides aligning with the crypto ethos, the decision to open source Certora Prover was also driven by the fact that smart contract security is becoming slow and expensive. Security, Certora believes, shouldn’t be a privilege reserved for the well-funded; rather, it should be efficient, accessible, and an integrated part of development.

For over seven years now, the Certora Prover has been helping some of the wildly popular and adopted crypto platforms protect their users from falling victim to catastrophic exploits and, in turn, helping safeguard tens of billions of dollars.

But now, every crypto project can offer their users the same kind of protection that only the well-funded platforms can afford to provide their customers, promising a more secure future for crypto.

Empowering Builders with Industrial-Grade Security

The Certora Prover is not your average security solution. It is a formal verification engine that, unlike auditing and testing, guarantees security by detecting all bugs and eventually proving their absence.

The Certora team defines it as an “automated mathematical auditor” for smart contracts. Here, the project developer provides their contract code plus the rules, which are written in the Solidity-like and open-source CVL, as input and gets the Proofs of correctness or counterexamples showing bugs as the output. The result is the assurance that your code is secure and behaving as intended.

Over the years, Certora Prover has caught several prominent bugs, such as the MakerDAO’s DAI Equation Bug, SushiSwap’s Trident Pool Drain, and PRBMath’s Rounding Error.

These bugs would have been detrimental to these widely adopted protocols but the Certora Prover found them and provided suitable solutions that helped maintain their stability and protected millions of users’ funds.

With Certora Prover now open-sourced, developers can catch rare bugs early and prevent exploits from happening while reducing their audit costs by as much as 30% with pre-verified code. In addition to this, Certora offers multi-chain support covering Ethereum, Solana, and Soroban, which protects a major chunk of the crypto sector.

The automated security of Prover can also be run on every change in code just by writing it once. Moreover, developers can enjoy Certora Prover’s mathematical correctness and offer their users complete peace of mind.

So, as the cryptocurrency space continues to grow with adoption and capital flow soaring, builders can leverage the open-source Certora Prover to build trust with verifiable correctness and democratize security across Web3.