KEVM: Overview and Progress Report
Duration: 00:21:35
Speaker: Everett Hildenbrandt
Type: Talk
Expertise: Advanced
Event: Devcon
Date: Jul 2026
Since the IC3 Crypto Boot Camp, we have been extending the KEVM semantics in several directions. At the time, we only supported the VMTests from the Ethereum Test Suite, it was somewhat difficult to write properties and proofs about programs in EVM, and EVM-PRIME was a simple demonstrative toy language. This session will cover the progress so far in addressing these issues, as well as our goals and intentions for the semantics moving forward. In particular, we are focused on providing tools to ease the process of writing and proving specifications about programs written in high-level languages. Everett Hildenbrandt is a CS PhD student at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying formal methods and programming languages. He is focused on improving the scalability of symbolic reasoning for applications in both distributed and physical systems. In the context of blockchain systems, he is interested in formalizing the semantics of both the underlying languages used and the consensus protocols. To this end, he recently led the KEVM project which developed an executable mathematical model of the EVM in the K Framework.