Ethereum Foundation Blog

Special thanks to Tim Swanson for reviewing, and for further discussions on the arguments in his original paper on settlement finality. Recently one of the major disputes in ongoing debate between public blockchain and permissioned blockchain proponents is the issue of settlement finality. One of the simple properties that a centralized system at least appears to have is a notion of “finality”: once an operation is completed, that operation is completed for good, and there is no way that the... [Read More]

After almost three months into the “reboot” of the C++ team, I would like to give an update about the team itself, what we did and what we plan to do. Team update The so-called C++ team currently consists of Paweł Bylica (@chfast), Greg Colvin (@gcolvin), Liana Husikyan (@LianaHus), Dimitry Khokhlov (@winsvega), Yann Levreau (@yann300), Bob Summerwill (@bobsummerwill), me (@chriseth) and (kindly “donated” by Eris Industries) RJ (@VoR0220). Paweł is the original author of the llvm-based EVM-to-native just-in-time compiler, re-joined in... [Read More]

[Last update: July 5, 2016] The Ethereum Foundation and Wanxiang Blockchain Labs are excited to jointly announce the International Blockchain Week in Shanghai, which will take place at Hyatt on the Bund, September 19–24, 2016. Both Ethereum’s Devcon and Wanxiang Blockchain Labs’ Global Blockchain Summit were sold out last year with great interest and anticipation for this year’s events. Now, people who wish to attend both events can do so in the same week. The combined event features a unique... [Read More]

The Ethereum Foundation has announced that it will be working with the New York-based banking consortium R3CEV on creating a new blockchain-based cryptocurrency, Lizardcoin, which aims to showcase the benefits of blockchain technology as well as the consortium’s ability to bring the technology to institutional clients and the regulation-loving masses by supplementing it with a healthy dose of centralized control. Lizardcoin aims to be a direct competitor to Bitcoin as a store-of-value, beating out Bitcoin’s 21 million fixed supply cap... [Read More]

Consensys and Microsoft have announced that the Ethereum contract programming language Solidity will be available in Microsoft’s Visual Studio integrated development environment. ConsenSys and Microsoft collaborated on this integration to enable developers to rapidly build smart contract-based applications for the public Ethereum blockchain, as well as private and consortium blockchain deployments based on Ethereum. This integration is being revealed at //Build, Microsoft’s annual developer conference, in San Francisco on March 30th; Vitalik Buterin, Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin and Consensys Enterprise... [Read More]

Ethereum’s present reliance on Proof of Work (PoW) mining is not ideal, and while we continue to work with gusto towards a Proof of Stake solution (PoS), we have to live with PoW as gracefully as possible (at least until the eventual switch!). Meanwhile, in the interest of overall network health, mining decentralization and diversity is a clear imperative: [caption id=”attachment_2623” align=”alignnone” width=”622”] Mining Pool Diversity from March 28 via https://etherchain.org/statistics/miners[/caption] Though there are some instances of open source Ethereum... [Read More]

After an additional two months of work after the release of the first python proof of concept release of Serenity, I am pleased to announce that Serenity PoC2 is now available. Although the release continues to be far from a testnet-ready client, much less a production-ready one, PoC2 brings with it a number of important improvements. First and foremost, the goal of PoC2 was to implement the complete protocol, including the basic corner cases (slashing bets and deposits), so as... [Read More]

Update: We’ve released version 1.3.5 including networking hotfix for homestead 1.3.4.  Development of Ethereum started in December 2013 when two developers and a college dropout researcher decided to put their heads together and develop this amazing piece of technology. We were later joined by many like-minded individuals. Our first Proof of Concept (PoC) came on February 1, 2014. By the time we started our crowdsale on July 23, we were up to PoC 5 with a protocol that was almost finished,... [Read More]

Ethereum is often described as a platform for self-enforcing smart contracts. While this is certainly true, this article argues that, especially when more complex systems are involved, it is rather a court with smart lawyers and a judge that is not so smart, or more formally, a judge with restricted computational resources. We will see later how this view can be leveraged to write very efficient smart contract systems, to the extent that cross-chain token transfers or computations like checking... [Read More]

Following hacking @ DEVCON1,  Martin Swende is Nr. 1 on the leaderboard of the Ethereum Bounty Program. The bounty program is ongoing and the last bounty awarded amounted to 5 BTC. The program is open to anyone. With BTC Relay getting ready for launch on Ethereum and its importance for many DApps, we want to highlight its ongoing security audit by including it in the Ethereum Bounty Program. BTC Relay is an Ethereum contract that implements Bitcoin SPV: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security The... [Read More]