Thanks to all the developers and team leads who contributed to the sections on their projects In the last month and a half, the Ethereum network went through a rapid growth in usage, to the point that it now processes as many transactions per second as Bitcoin. To accommodate the increased load, which has on a few occasions reached the network’s full capacity for hours at a time, the community independently came together and miners voted to increase the gas...

Over the last month and a half we saw vigorous ongoing research and development on all sides of the Ethereum roadmap, and progress is rapidly starting to translate into real results that can be run and verified inside of an Ethereum client. On Metropolis: Agendas for core dev meetings 15 and 16 here: https://github.com/ethereum/pm/issues/13 and https://github.com/ethereum/pm/issues/14 List of accepted EIPs here: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/README.md (mostly agreed on, though we are still going back and forth on details such as gas costs) Most...

A bug in the Solidity optimizer was reported through the Ethereum Foundation Bounty program, by Christoph Jentzsch. This bug is patched as of 2017-05-03, with the release of Solidity 0.4.11. Background The bug in question concerned how the optimizer optimizes on constants in the byte code. By “byte code constants”, we mean anything which is PUSHed on the stack (not to be confused with Solidity constants). For example, if the value 0xfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffe is PUSHed, then the optimizer can either do...

The last one and a half months have seen great progress for Ethereum research, and we are excited that the protocol is moving closer and closer to the point where it is ready for mainstream adoption. Progress on consensus algorithms, privacy, zero knowledge proofs and formal verification is happening at increasing speed, and our research and development teams are expanding substantially. A large amount of progress has been made on Casper. You can find a few Medium posts describing the...

The last one and a half months have seen great progress for Ethereum research, and we are excited that the protocol is moving closer and closer to the point where it is ready for mainstream adoption. Progress on consensus algorithms, privacy, zero knowledge proofs and formal verification is happening at increasing speed, and our research and development teams are expanding substantially. After three years of trying to find solutions to the "nothing at stake" and "stake grinding" attacks, we have...

It’s been a fairly busy for the last couple of months for the Ethereum javascripters. To start with, there was a really great hackathon with IPFS. You can read Dan Finlay’s excellent write up here. Also, during this time Aaron Davis (Kumavis) made some excellent progress towards a JS light client by utilizing IPFS’s libp2p to build a in-browser mesh network and IPLD to provide the merklization layer. This will be important work in the future for building pure in-browser clients. Also Casey Detrio...

During the last month and a half, the Ethereum core development and research teams have been building upon the progress made in the last year, and with the specter of last year’s security issues now well behind us, work has begun in full force on implementing the Metropolis hard fork. First, ongoing progress on the collaboration with the Zcash team and the implementation of zk-SNARKs: The full series of "zk-SNARK explainer" posts from myself is now finished, see https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/quadratic-arithmetic-programs-from-zero-to-hero-f6d558cea649, https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/exploring-elliptic-curve-pairings-c73c1864e627 and https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/zk-snarks-under-the-hood-b33151a013f6 An update...

Members of the Ethereum R&D team and the Zcash Company are collaborating on a research project addressing the combination of programmability and privacy in blockchains. This joint post is being concurrently posted on the Zcash blog, and is coauthored by Ariel Gabizon (Zcash) and Christian Reitwiessner (Ethereum). Ethereum’s flexible smart contract interface enables a large variety of applications, many of which have probably not yet been conceived. The possibilities grow considerably when adding the capacity for privacy. Imagine, for example, an...