Certora organized the first formal verification contests for Rust-based Soroban smart contracts on Stellar, partnering with Code4rena and Cantina. The contests for Blend v2 and Aquarius protocols featured a 40,000 USDC prize pool and used mutation testing to evaluate specifications. They demonstrated the effectiveness of Certora's Sunbeam prover in securing DeFi protocols on Stellar.
Certora hosted two pioneering formal verification contests for Soroban smart contracts on the Stellar blockchain, targeting Rust code with their open-source Prover and Sunbeam tool. The first contest with Code4rena audited Blend v2's Backstop contract, while the second with Cantina covered Aquarius's fees_collector and access_control contracts. Participants wrote CVLR specifications to prove security properties, evaluated via mutation testing with tools like universalmutator. Over 2,600 rules were created across 47 participants, catching mutants and real vulnerabilities, with top performers earning significant rewards. The contests highlighted formal verification's role in securing Stellar DeFi protocols like lending pools and liquidity management.
