Ethereum Foundation Blog

London, United Kingdom, October 22nd - The Ethereum Foundation is pleased to announce the Keynote Speaker of Ethereum’s annual conference DΞVCON1, Nick Szabo. Nick’s keynote will focus on the history of the blockchain, smart contracts and assets on the blockchain. Nick is a computer scientist, legal scholar and cryptographer known for his research on digital contracts and digital currency. The phrase and concept of “smart contracts” was developed by Szabo with the intent of merging contract law into programming protocols... [Read More]

Summary: Erroneous implementation of BLOCKHASH can trigger a chain reorganisation leading to consensus problems Affected configurations: All geth versions up to 1.1.3 and 1.2.2. All eth versions prior to 1.0.0. Likelihood: Low Severity: Medium Impact: Medium Details: Both C++ (eth) and Go (geth) clients have an erroneous implementation of an edge case in the Ethereum virtual machine, specifically which chain the BLOCKHASH instruction uses for retrieving a block hash. This edge case is very unlikely to happen on a live... [Read More]

Over the last five days, myself, our executive director Ming Chan, and several others from the Ethereum team and Ethereum-based projects and businesses including Maker, String/Dfinity and Consensys have been visiting China and Hong Kong, where there have been a series of back-to-back conferences and events most notably including the Blockchain Workshop in Hong Kong on Oct 11-13 and the “First Global Blockchain Summit” in Shanghai organized by our friends at Wanxiang on Oct 15-16, while at the same time... [Read More]

In an effort to bring the community more information about the going-ons at Ethereum, we’re planning to release semi-weekly updates of project progress. I hope this provides some high-level information without having to live on GitHub ;) The Go and C++ teams have daily standups and are making regular progress along with several other improvements around the ecosystem. Concurrent with this, the teams are gearing up for DEVCON1, preparing talks and presentations along with finalizing more details in the coming weeks. If you... [Read More]

Affected configurations: Issue reported for eth (cpp-ethereum).</section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody">Likelihood: Medium</section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody">Severity: High</section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody">Impact: Potentially achieve remote code execution on a machine running eth (cpp-ethereum)</section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody">Details:</section>A vulnerability found in the MiniUPnP library can potentially affect eth clients running with UPnP enabled. Effects on expected chain reorganisation depth: none</section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody"></section><section class="postbody">Remedial action taken by Ethereum: We are verifying whether this can indeed... [Read More]

Many of you know that the Ethereum platform grew out of the realization that blockchains can go far beyond currency, together with a frustration with the limitations of previous projects. The core idea was simple: a blockchain with a built-in Turing-complete programming language, allowing users to build any kind of applications on top. Over time, the vision evolved and expanded. The blockchain remains a crucial centerpiece, but it is ultimately only part of a larger vision of “web 3.0” as... [Read More]

The following are some interesting results on the performance of different miners over the course of the first 280,000 blocks of the Ethereum blockchain. For this timespan I have collected the list of block and uncle coinbase addresses; raw data can be found here for blocks and here for uncles, and from this we can glean a lot of interesting information particularly about stale rates and how well-connected the different miners and pools are. First off, the scatter plot: What... [Read More]

DevCon 1 will be happening in London on November 9-13, a little over one hundred days since the Ethereum network launched. Over the last months, we’ve seen the network grow from a few hundred nodes starting on that one exciting and special night to a very substantial, globally deployed stable platform with thousands of devs pushing towards the decentralization revolution which motivates and inspires us. DevCon will have three primary categories of topics: Basic research and core protocols: including proof... [Read More]

The foundation is currently in the phase of restructuring its communications activities. Several members of our current communications team in London are soon leaving or reducing their involvement in the Foundation in order to pursue for-profit ventures on top of the Ethereum ecosystem; we wish them the best of luck. And so, we have both the necessity and a unique opportunity to “reboot” that side of the organization and take another look at how the Ethereum foundation interacts with the... [Read More]

We are happy to announce our very first developer-preview of the Ethereum Wallet ÐApp. The point of this release is to gather feedback, squash bugs and, most importantly, get the code audited. Please note that this is a developer-preview and not the final release. We advise you to be extremely careful putting large amount of Ether in the wallet contracts. Using the wallet on the mainnet should only be done with small amounts!   As Steve Ballmer once said Developers!... [Read More]