Enter the Hydra – An Experimental Approach to Smart Contract Security
Duration: 00:21:04
Speaker: Phil Daian
Type: Talk
Expertise: Advanced
Event: Devcon
Date: Jul 2026
In this talk, we will demonstrate a new approach to secure smart contract development that we believe has the potential to remove a large class of implementation bugs that has plagued the ecosystem. We will discuss connections to other topics in secure smart contract development and announce an effort to build the most secure Ethereum contract ever launched on the mainnet! Philip Daian is a Computer Science graduate student pursuing a PhD at Cornell University. He specializes in smart contracts and smart contract security, as well as the confidentiality properties of distributed ledger technology. He brings experience in the formal verification and automotive domains. Before coming to Cornell, he worked with runtime verification and formal methods, first collaborating with the FSL on several projects as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later moving to the private sector. He looks forward to building the next generation of efficient and open financial cryptosystems.
