Patrick Azzopardi

Patrick Azzopardi is CEO and co-founder of Dowsers, a platform focused on automated formal verification of smart contracts for on-chain finance. Formal verification is a mathematical discipline that proves software cannot produce a defined set of catastrophic outcomes, as distinct from conventional testing, which can detect bugs but cannot prove their absence. In the context of on-chain finance, Azzopardi identifies three properties Dowsers formally verifies: that a digital asset cannot be withdrawn without its owner's consent, that an asset cannot be locked without the user's knowledge, and that a protocol's rules cannot be changed without the user's knowledge.

The founding team at Dowsers draws its formal verification expertise from work on the automated metro lines in Paris, where they mathematically proved that software carrying 500 million passengers a year, comprising hundreds of thousands of lines of code, could not produce a collision. Azzopardi's own background is in investment banking, with prior experience as an M&A advisor. He has been involved with blockchain since 2014, and the original foundation idea for Dowsers was to apply formal verification expertise to secure the team's own crypto and NFT investments through reliable smart contract analysis.