MetaTrust Labs, AgentLayer, and top academic institutions collaborate on research, receiving a prestigious academic conference award for pioneering breakthroughs in AI-enhanced smart contract security

Source: AgentLayer

San Diego, California - February 27, 2025 - The 32nd Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2025) has awarded its prestigious "Distinguished Paper Award" to the paper titled "PropertyGPT: LLM-Driven Smart Contract Formal Verification via Retrieval-Enhanced Property Generation." This groundbreaking research, conducted in collaboration between MetaTrust Labs and AgentLayer researchers and top academic institutions, introduces an innovative approach that utilizes a large language model (LLM) to automate and enhance the formal verification process.

PropertyGPT addresses a key gap in blockchain security by automatically creating comprehensive verification properties—an area that was previously a manual, expert-driven process. This technology has been successfully deployed through AgentLayer's decentralized AI network, marking a significant advancement in smart contract security practices.

"PropertyGPT not only addresses the efficiency bottlenecks of traditional formal verification but also achieves scalable applications through AgentLayer's distributed architecture," said Professor Liu Yang, Executive Director of the Nanyang Technological University Cyber Security Research Center in Singapore and co-founder of AgentLayer. "Our approach demonstrates that LLMs can significantly enhance the formal verification process, making it more accessible and comprehensive."

Technical Innovation and Impact

PropertyGPT leverages the contextual learning capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs to transfer the knowledge of existing manually authored properties to custom security specifications generated for new smart contract code. The system incorporates various cutting-edge technologies:

- Retrieval-Enhanced Generation, combining LLM's semantic understanding with historical vulnerability data retrieval through a vector database

- Compiler and Static Analysis Feedback Loop to iteratively improve property quality

- Multi-dimensional Similarity Assessment for property ranking and selection

- Custom Prover for formal verification of properties

In extensive testing, PropertyGPT achieved an impressive 80% recall rate compared to expert-generated properties. The system successfully identified 26 known vulnerabilities out of 37 test cases and discovered 12 previously unknown security flaws, earning a $8,256 bug bounty reward.

AgentLayer Integration and Industry Impact

AgentLayer has integrated its proprietary AI Agent with PropertyGPT to optimize the automated verification process of smart contracts. Experiments have shown that this tool enhances vulnerability detection efficiency of complex contracts by 40% in DeFi and Web3 scenarios.

The NDSS Review Committee has praised this achievement as providing a "practically implementable paradigm upgrade for smart contract security."

Strategic Partnerships

The collaboration between MetaTrust Labs and AgentLayer represents a significant commitment to enhancing blockchain security through advanced AI technology. Future plans include:

- Launching cutting-edge AI products that combine MetaTrust Labs' expertise in smart contract security with AgentLayer's innovation in AI technology

- Developing specialized AI Agents for blockchain application development

- Building a more robust decentralized AI ecosystem

About the NDSS Symposium

Hosted by the Internet Society for over 30 years, the NDSS Symposium has evolved into one of the world's premier security conferences. Originally focused on network and distributed system security, the conference brings together hundreds of security educators, researchers, and practitioners from around the globe to advance the development of practical security technologies.

About the Research Team

The collaborative team includes researchers from MetaTrust Labs, AgentLayer, Singapore Management University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Nanyang Technological University: Ye Liu (SMU, AgentLayer), Yue Xue (MetaTrust Labs), Daoyuan Wu (HKUST, AgentLayer), Yuqiang Sun (NTU), Yi Li (NTU), Miaolei Shi (MetaTrust Labs), and Yang Liu (NTU, AgentLayer).

About MetaTrust Labs

MetaTrust Labs is a leading Web3 security platform that offers AI-driven solutions to blockchain developers. Born at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, it provides tools for automated security scanning, smart contract auditing, and simplified security management. MetaTrust Labs is shaping the future of secure Web3 infrastructure.

About AgentLayer

AgentLayer is pioneering the future of decentralized AI with the launch of the world's first blockchain network designed for autonomous AI Agents. By seamlessly integrating cutting-edge AI capabilities with blockchain technology, AgentLayer enables developers and enterprises to massively build, deploy, and trade intelligent Agents.