I’m not sure to be honest because I don’t know how much comes from major tech firms - but I do know someone who financed their own research center and have seen probably billions in the last year or two so it feels like a sizeable amount compared to standard academic funding for fairly niche stuff.

And if you look at it from a technical perspective where your options are TLA+, Coq, Agda, Isabelle, etc, I think you’ll find most of the core devs are involved in blockchain somehow nowadays. At least that’s what it feels like.

Yeah for sure, but the underlying chains are pretty solid, and some of the languages are particularly well formalized such as Plutus (which is led by SPJ’s son with a few of the original Haskell language team).

But you can’t save people from bugs higher up the stack when it comes to turing complete contracts. It can definitely be better though.

You are getting downvoted because your reasoning is flawed. Smart contract exploiting has nothing to do with whether formal reasoning works or not. It’s as incorrect as saying that cars doesn’t work because your car doesn’t work.

Even if formal methods could make your contracts bulletproof, they don't help at all when people don't use them. The barrier to entry in smart contract development is pretty low, and lots of people don't do everything they should to minimize risk.

Two projects that did use formal methods are the beacon chain deposit contract, and (iirc) Uniswap, and both have been fine.

I know - I no longer care about Karma on HN because if you chat about crypto regularly it’s entirely based on which Pro vs Anti group has seen it more. +1 from me because the space needs good questions :)