Ontology has partnered with CertiK, an American-based formal verification company for smart contracts and blockchain ecosystems. CertiK is comprised of PhD’s from Yale and Columbia, as well as engineers who’ve worked at Google, Facebook, and Freewheel, amongst other Silicon Valley-based companies. Key features of the formal verification company include a “layer-based decomposition approach, pluggable proof engine, machine-checkable proof objects, certified decentralized application (dApp) libraries, and smart labelling.”

According to Gu Ronghui, co-founder of CertiK, formal verification uses “logical language to describe standards and [uses] strict mathematical deduction to examine whether the given system meets requirements.” CertiK utilizes technical standards to convert smart contracts into “modularized mathematical models,” then uses “logical deduction” to validate the security of the smart contracts.

CertiK has identified three security issues surrounding smart contracts that it believes can be improved upon. First, when a smart contract is released on the blockchain, it is irreversible and can not be changed. Second, as the majority of code on blockchain projects is open-source, security vulnerabilities are very difficult to hide. Third, traditional security testing and real-time monitoring is not able to meet the high security requirements of a blockchain.

Through the partnership, Ontology and CertiK will coordinate to “detect security vulnerabilities of open-source code through deep specification technology and ensure the security and reliability of smart contracts before their release.” Through an automatic formal verification, the two entities surmise the limitations of human detection, and the cost of smart contract verification can be decreased.

On the partnership, Gu Ronghui believes a fundamental commonality between Ontology and CertiK is that “trust and security are the most important consensus of the blockchain industry.”

Li Jun, Ontology founder, hopes the partnership between the two entities will “bring more real cases of smart contract formal verification, solve blockchain security pain points, and create an ecosystem with high security.”

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