$20M to play with. I don't know what world you inhabit. I inhabit a world where security researchers in dusty faculty buildings earn under $20,000.
This piece was satirical, so the details aren't 100% but I hope you understand the general message.
I don't care whether John, Mick or George invented Solidity. The Ethereum foundation created it, and my point still stands. There's tons of literature on formal languages no need to reinvent the wheel with a bullshit language.
Smart contract language research is decades old (read nick szabo's '02 blogs for example, which cites older research)
They have created no new unexplored field, just reinvented the wheel with half-baked pump material.
You don't understand what you're talking about. Formal language is a language which has a grammar. Pretty much any programming language is a formal language.
You probably meant formally-verifiable language. There are many ways to approach formal verification, none of them is general purpose. So it's still a question what kind of formal verification is needed for smart contracts.
Contract languages are still a research subject. Again, they are still not general enough.
Tbh I was sort of trolling, just skim read a reddit post on formal verification and jumped on the fud train