Formal verification is almost always too costly for most projects but it seems like a good match here given the financial risks are so high. From what I've seen

Formal verification is almost always too costly for most projects but it seems like a good match here given the financial risks are so high. From what I've seen though, cryptocurrencies seem to take off based on marketing + emotions first followed by technical merit. The Ethereum project is really interesting for example and there are talks of applying formal verification to it, but it doesn't look like the language used for smart contracts there was designed to be easily applicable to formal verification. I'd like to see a cryptocoin developed from the ground up with formal verification in mind instead of it being an afterthought. Most coins have clients written in unsafe languages like C or C++ so I don't see this happening any time soon.