Mark Petruska

formal methods engineer

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

🚨 BREAKING: More than 400 Arch Linux User Repository packages have been compromised with infostealer malware and a rootkit.

Attacker posed as a trusted maintainer and "adopted" orphaned packages.

Arch maintainers are purging infected packages now. Audit your AUR installs.

[Coin Bureau @coinbureau]

🔥VITALIK: LIQUIDATION-FREE DEFI IS ON THE WAY

Buterin says multiple teams are building different versions of his proposal to replace forced liquidations with an options-based system.

He urged formal verification before anything goes live.

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

The controversy over "You should be able to prove your program correct before you run it" is still live.

For several decades after Dijkstra's pronouncement, the conventional wisdom was that he was wrong. And, with the tools and the hardware we had available, that was difficult to dispute. Attempts to apply formal proof methods scaled very badly, seldom worked at all on programs of larger than toy size, and were ridiculously expensive.

However, in the future that may change. There has been a lot of theoretical progress towards practical proofs on programs of nontrivial size. They remain difficult to apply to common languages and toolchains.

If we get Dijkstra's future it will be because the transition costs of moving to languages on which proofs are practical fall to the point where moving is less than the continuing cost of errors. LLMs make language-to-language translation cheap and will help.

Two domains to watch are avionics and medical-device software. The transition, if and when it becomes practical, is likely to start there.

[Romain Soulat @RSoulatIOHK]

Random experiment of the day. Using hs-to-lean, we can add a custom comment tag to add #Haskell specifications, and then send everything to #Lean and Blaster.

Claude made a small custom Visual Studio code to inline the results directly in Visual Studio.

Contrary to LiquidHaskell, we're not modular, if you call a function, we don't stub it with the specification. This means you don't have to specify every function, just the higher level ones, with the high level properties.
On top of that, you get a full counter-example to replay as a test vector on any falsified property.

This is purely a Proof of concept for the moment.

hs-to-lean: https://t.co/YYwiHpdlf9
Blaster: https://t.co/rR7ZzAuwwu

[Phil 🪏 @phil_uplc]

Founder of OpenZeppelin.

I guess formal verification of permissionless financial instruments is pretty important.

Blaster is our new Ouroboros, at-least three years ahead of all smart contract formal verification frameworks in other ecosystems.

[Romain Soulat @RSoulatIOHK]

I want to thank the #Cardano community for granting our consortium 13.08m ada to deliver the extended version of Blaster and bring formal verification to all DApp developers.

We're fully aware this is a significant amount of ada. We believe in our tool and in our vision of what good, accessible formal verification tooling should look like. We're glad to see the community shares that vision.

The tool is open-source, but still at an early stage. We're still very much heads-down on this year's deliverables.

So far, we built a #Lean automated reasoning backend that outperforms the academic competition on neutral benchmarks, and is the only one able to prove UPLC programs running on the CEK machine: https://t.co/rR7ZzAuwwu

We delivered a complete formalization of the CEK machine, Plutus Core builtins, and UPLC, tailored for Blaster, but usable by anyone who wants to prove correctness of UPLC programs in Lean: https://t.co/JlBARn4kMR

We're now delivering the different ledger rules for script contexts and the Cardano Ledger API formalization (at the Data level!), also tailored for Blaster so users can easily express what a "correct script context" is: https://t.co/SHdWP72cqK

Work is in progress: optimizations are being pushed, we're formalizing the new builtins, the new CEK machine rules, the new cost models, and more.

And just because something has been delivered doesn't mean we stop: we're continuously improving the reasoning core, the formalizations, all of it.

If you want to use the tool and are looking for help, we're on Discord: https://t.co/vQajBBJi9m

I promise, we're friendly. We just want to see the tool actually used by people ❤️

[Sssebi🦁 @Sssebi]

Ascend DEX is now live on Midnight mainnet, making it the first dApp to launch on Midnight🔥

[Romain Soulat @RSoulatIOHK]

Robertino’s proposal is, in my view, very important to allow new developers to not have to face all the troubles we all had to go through.
If both, his and High assurance proposals pass, those 5 production ready contracts will come with their formal proofs using Blaster. This means that developers using those could reuse them, tweak to fit their business needs and in CI/CD check that the security properties have not been broken. Everything fully automated.

[Thomas Vellekoop @perturbing101]

Hey all DReps, we are almost at the threshold for the Plutus proposal, thank for all YES votes thusfar, truly!

For those who can still make the difference, please read the following.

Part of the proposal is about introducing a Poseidon hash built-in to Plutus.

🧵

[Riley🪏 @ILikeCardano]

If you are a dRep who has not yet voted on the Plutus Core proposal, please take the time to review the proposal and consider voting yes to support further development of Cardano's UPLC smart contract platform.

Time to vote is ending in less than 12 hours!
@LucasMacchia2 @MicahAlexKenda1 @BullishDumpling @tempo_vote @longminswap @TheOCcryptobro @wolf31o2

[Input Output Group @IOGroup]

Final hours before DRep voting closes.

Over the last 5 weeks, IO has published full proposal breakdowns, delivery plans and milestones, FAQs, proposal rationale, open discussions with initiative leads, and the proposals that were rejected alongside the reasoning behind those decisions.

The work is public and the decision now sits with the community.

Review the proposals and cast your vote:
https://t.co/x9KA1psEXa

[Phil 🪏 @phil_uplc]

Because most people don’t understand that plutus is not a smart contract language, it is the smart contract layer itself.

No Plutus => no improvements to smart contracts on Cardano.

Our smart contract platform desperately needs major improvements, a significant
improvement to efficiency, interoperability, modules, new builtins.

Right now there are gigabytes of redundant publication of the same standard library functions in the Cardano ledger history. Every single time someone publishes a smart contract language to Cardano they are redundantly republishing the same standard library functions. If left unaddressed, this bloat will continue to accumulate and plague us forever.

[Cardano YOD₳ @JaromirTesar]

Hi DReps, if you are still looking for another IO proposal that should be approved at the last minute, I believe it is this one:

IO & VacuumLabs: Enhancing Plutus - Performance, Correctness, and Usability

[Seungheon Oh @SeungheonO]

Plutus running ~1M scripts/month is evidence that the foundation works.
And mature infrastructure is exactly where careful, targeted improvements matter most.

Smart contract platforms across major ecosystems continue evolving as adoption grows.

This proposal focuses on:
• Estimated ~30% cost reductions
• New primitives like Poseidon for ZK workloads
• Property-based conformance testing to strengthen node diversity
• Continuous security audits and further Agda formalization

That’s how strong foundations stay strong.

[Carlos Lopez de Lara @carloslodelar]

DRep votes coming in, looks like Leios will have the required support from DReps.

Thank you, guys! 🫡 Won't let you down.

We still need 2 more CC votes🗳️

[Input Output Group @IOGroup]

Plutus is the smart contract platform behind applications built on Cardano.

This proposal focuses on enhancing:
• efficiency and cost-effectiveness
• security, reliability, and testing
• readiness for the next generation of Cardano infrastructure
• the developer experience and tooling

It’s about making Cardano’s core smart contract layer more efficient, more secure, and more accessible for builders.

As Cardano adoption grows, investing in the foundations matters. Plutus is one of those foundations.

Read the proposal: https://t.co/YQTUXqMzyC

[Cardano YOD₳ @JaromirTesar]

4 out of 9 IO proposals seem to get funding.

[Seungheon Oh @SeungheonO]

@Cardano_CF

Please reconsider the NO vote on the Plutus proposal.

After reading the rationale, I think several points misunderstand the scope and impact of the work:

The proposed features are strictly additive. Existing languages and tooling can continue operating on the current Plutus version without immediate changes. This is not forced breakage for downstream compilers; a significant amount of engineering effort goes into preserving that compatibility.

Most proposed builtins are performance-oriented. The community has consistently asked for cheaper execution, better script efficiency, and higher-throughput smart contracts. Several of these proposals also originate from community-driven CIP discussions, which reflects clear ecosystem demand for the capabilities these builtins provide.

Plinth is not just “one language’s tooling.” It also serves as a reference implementation for Plutus. Improvements there help clarify semantics, surface edge cases, and provide guidance that other ecosystem tools can rely on.

ZK builtins are not feature bloat. Without them, many ZK applications are either impossible or only feasible in a very limited form on Cardano. If we want Cardano to support serious zero-knowledge cryptographic applications, these builtins are necessary.

Budget transparency and downstream coordination may be worth discussing, but they should not be conflated with the technical value of the proposal itself.

This proposal strengthens the foundations of Plutus and expands what developers can realistically build on Cardano, which I believe is essential if Cardano is going to remain competitive with smart contract environments of other blockchains.

[Thomas Vellekoop @perturbing101]

All Dreps, I ask you to vote YES on this proposal!

It might seem like a boring proposal, but the ROI after this is delivered is immediate. The past improvements showed this.

For those who voted NO, please reconsider your vote. Plutus is not done; we can improve so much more.

[Christian Schmitz @cschmitz398]

Cardano and Midnight are getting a big upgrade 🔥

Cardano tokens are getting privacy and Midnight is getting tokens and liquidity