Formal Systems Laboratory

IELE: A Rigorously Designed Language and Tool Ecosystem for the Blockchain

Abstract. This paper proposes IELE, an LLVM-style language, together with a tool ecosystem for implementing and formally reasoning about smart contracts on the blockchain. IELE was designed by specifying its semantics formally in the K framework. Its implementation, a IELE virtual machine (VM), as well as a formal verification tool for IELE smart contracts, were automatically generated from the formal specification. The automatically generated formal verification tool allows us to formally verify smart contracts without any gap between the verifier and the actual VM. A compiler from Solidity, the predominant high- level language for smart contracts, to IELE has also been (manually) implemented, so Ethereum contracts can now also be executed on IELE.