Vitalik predicts bug-free future for smart contracts

Developers who prioritize security can expect bug-free coding to become achievable in the 2030s, according to Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin. 

After Gnosis Chain’s controversial hard fork to recover $9.4 million from the Balancer hack Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the belief that “bugs are inevitable, you can’t make bug-free code” will stop being true in the 2030s.

What did Vitalik Buterin say about coding? 

Vitalik Buterin has made a prediction that bug-free code will become a thing in the 2030s through an interaction on the social media platform, X. 

The discussion began when Gnosis Chain announced that it executed a hard fork on December 22, as reported by Cryptopolitan. The hard fork recovered $9.4 million stolen during the November 2024 Balancer exploit, which drained over $128 million across multiple blockchains. The recovery required most validators to adopt new software, and those who failed to update are facing penalties.

This, of course, was met with some resistance from blockchain supporters who criticized the move because it goes against the principle of immutability. An X user with the moniker ‘colluding node’ said the real problem is how blockchain applications are built. They argued that using smart contracts in programmable virtual machines is the wrong approach. 

“There are only 7 contracts worth writing, and they should just be enshrined in the base layer and get security from client diversity,” the user wrote. 

Buterin then responded by clarifying that formally verified does not equal provably bug-free. He went further to suggest that provably bug-free code may not even be possible.

“I’d even go so far as to say that ‘provably bug free’ is not possible, because ‘bug-free’ means ‘no gap between intention and code execution’, and our intention is an extremely complex object we have only limited access to.” 

Formal verification uses mathematical methods to check whether safety-critical systems perform correctly. The technique has been used since the 1960s in fields like aerospace engineering. 

When used in smart contracts, formal verification can prove that a contract’s business logic meets a predefined specification; however, despite the fact that Balancer contracts were audited 11 times, conducted by four separate security firms, a critical flaw still slipped through. 

Is a bug-free code future possible? 

Buterin proposed that the solution is multiple layers of redundancy to filter out gaps between intention and execution. He pointed to type systems as one form of redundancy, and formally verifying specific claims about code as another layer.

Formal verification can detect issues such as integer underflows and overflow, re-entrancy, and poor gas optimizations that may slip past auditors and testers. Meanwhile, traditional testing can only check for the presence of errors rather than their absence.

Buterin noted that some software will continue having bugs because functionality gains matter more than perfection in certain cases. But developers who prioritize security will have the tools to achieve truly bug-free code.

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