NEW YORK, May 14, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Recently, the Ethereum Foundation announced its Q1 2025 research grant recipients, and CertiK—the world’s largest Web3 security firm—was awarded two research grants stemming from the zkEVM formal verification competition. This achievement marks not only a milestone in Ethereum’s scalability strategy, but also highlights CertiK’s global leadership in the formal verification of zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) systems.
The key to CertiK’s success lies in its “Advanced Formal Verification” technology, which offers four major breakthroughs over traditional approaches: it targets actual code rather than abstract models; it verifies specific code properties instead of generic traits; it tackles complex verification tasks through an automated framework, overcoming human limitations; and it is suitable for large-scale production environments, rather than being confined to academic research. Notably, formal verification has been central to CertiK’s mission since its inception, leveraging academic research to deliver high-reliability security services for Web3 projects.
These strengths make CertiK especially adept at handling complex ZKP systems. For instance, last year, CertiK completed the first full formal verification of the zkWasm circuit—a breakthrough that proved that comprehensive formal verification of complex zero-knowledge circuits is achievable. CertiK’s formal verification technology has already been widely adopted in leading Web3 projects and infrastructure, including TON mainnet smart contracts; Cosmos SDK; and Ant Group’s HyperEnclave TEE, Asterinas OS, and SGX TRTS SDK, demonstrating its broad applicability and high reliability.
zkEVM (Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine) is an innovation in blockchain technology that enhances Ethereum’s scalability using zero-knowledge proofs. It enables transaction computation to be offloaded from the blockchain while still providing succinct proofs to verify transaction validity—lowering costs and increasing throughput. However, the complexity of zkEVM introduces security risks, making formal verification essential for ensuring its correctness and safety. Formal verification uses mathematical methods to prove a system’s behavior under all possible conditions, ensuring there are no bugs or unexpected behaviors.
As blockchain technology rapidly evolves—especially with the growing adoption of zero-knowledge systems—formal verification is becoming a critical tool for ensuring system security and reliability. CertiK’s work strengthens Ethereum’s scalability and security while setting a benchmark for formal verification across the blockchain ecosystem.
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Elisa Yiting Xu
