testnets-cardano-org VS evm-semantics

To be frank, I have mixed opinions with the average Cardano investor. On one hand I think it's important to get burnt at least once whilst investing. It gives you a healthy dose of cynicism. Separates your emotions out of your investment. Ultimately you are investing into a common enterprise under the expectation to profit on said investment, finding someone to buy it from you at a higher price (often overlooked). DYOR is not watching a 3 hour stream of Charlie talking about could-be's and would-be's. https://github.com/cardano-foundation/testnets-cardano-org/issues/488 Bit of infamous open issue over here. People can't even get hello world to work on their Alonzo smart contracts. The top 20 US equities 20 years ago are not the same top 20 today. Considering how fast the Crypto space moves doesn't mean $DASH.. I mean $ADA is going to stay towards the top forever.

After 3 years of silence, KEVM started making the rounds again in the end of 2020 with all the usual big announcement. Once a test net was released, complaints started to rise that even a simple "Hello World" program was not working. Here are some more posts on the same issue. And another one. Regarding this problem with the faulty documentation a Github ticket was opened which has still not been resolved to this day. This was almost 6 months ago.

https://github.com/cardano-foundation/testnets-cardano-org/issues/488#issuecomment-796315624

I do wonder how much Cardano is really being used. Bugs like https://github.com/cardano-foundation/testnets-cardano-org/issues/488 are a bit suspicious; a hello world that hasn't been working since at least a month, and no fix seems to be on its way. Does anyone know how many smart contracts are actually running on Cardano currently?

The problem was first raised at https://www.reddit.com/r/CardanoDevelopers/comments/lqubkc/kevm_hello_world_not_working/ almost a month ago. The issue is still open: https://github.com/cardano-foundation/testnets-cardano-org/issues/488 and the Cardano Developer's engagement (or lack thereof) is poor to put it politely.

It has been almost a month since an issue was raised ( Invalid content /en/virtual-machines/kevm/getting-started/mallet-end-to-end/ · Issue #488 · cardano-foundation/testnets-cardano-org (github.com) regarding the simple 'hello world' tutorial not working on the KEVM.

K Framework is an operational semantics framework — a programming language for programming languages! K powers the formal verification services provided by Runtime Verification Inc. We have successfully applied K in the Ethereum space with KEVM, and we are now bringing our expertise and the power of K to Algorand with KAVM.

Formal verification usually works on the source code level, but Runtime Verification took a different approach: they focus on compiled code, i.e. the EVM bytecode of the contract. With that, it's possible to verify the correctness of more levels, e.g. compilation or ABI semantics. They have a full model of the EVM implemented in K, which was used for verifying the deposit contract: https://github.com/runtimeverification/evm-semantics

Have you heard of the K framework? It has already been used to write an executable specification of EVM. It seems like a better fit for the use-case than Scala, since K can be used for model checking or formal verification.

It seems the repo is this one https://github.com/kframework/evm-semantics, maintained by Runtime Verification a company that seems to works with IOHK