Following the controversial Gnosis Chain hard fork aimed at recovering $9.4 million stolen in the Balancer hack, Buterin stated that in the 2030s, it will no longer be possible to say that "bugs are inevitable; it's impossible to write bug-free code."

The Ethereum co-founder suggested that a breakthrough solution could be multi-layered redundancy, allowing for the filtering of gaps between design and implementation. He pointed to type systems as one form of redundancy, and formal verification of specific assertions about code as another level.

Formal verification can identify issues such as integer truncation and overflow, reentrancy, and inefficient gas optimization that may escape the attention of auditors and testers. Meanwhile, traditional testing can only verify the presence of bugs, not their absence.

Buterin also noted that some programs will continue to contain bugs because, in certain cases, functionality is more important than perfection. However, developers who prioritize security will have the tools to create truly bug-free code.