Verifying Liquidity of Bitcoin Contracts

Abstract

A landmark security property of smart contracts is liquidity: in a non-liquid contract, it may happen that some funds remain frozen. The relevance of this issue is witnessed by a recent liquidity attack to the Ethereum Parity Wallet, which has frozen ~160M USD within the contract, making this sum unredeemable by any user. We address the problem of verifying liquidity of Bitcoin contracts. Focussing on BitML, a contracts DSL with a computationally sound compiler to Bitcoin, we study various notions of liquidity. Our main result is that liquidity of BitML contracts is decidable, in all the proposed variants. To prove this, we first transform the infinite-state semantics of BitML into a finite-state one, which focusses on the behaviour of any given set of contracts, abstracting the context moves. With respect to the chosen contracts, this abstraction is sound and complete. Our decision procedure for liquidity is then based on model-checking the finite space of states of the abstraction.