Ethereum Foundation Blog

Although this is my first post in this blog, many people might already know me as the person behind Solidity. I recently took on the lead of the C++ team and would like to share my vision for the future development. Ethereum is a free software project that anyone is free to use and improve. From what we have seen at our conferences and meetups, there are so many people working on projects on top of Ethereum, but we only... [Read More]

Last month marked the 2 year anniversary of Ethereum’s public announcement at The North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, Florida, USA. Amid much rumour and excitement, a sizeable crowd mobbed the young Vitalik Buterin after his on-stage announcement, questioning the merit and his desire to build such a system. It can be hard to truly appreciate how far we’ve come in the last couple years. Sometimes it feels as if the cryptoeconomic sphere moves at such a blistering speed that... [Read More]

Part I Sometimes Ethereum is compared to a singleton Virtual Machine.  While this is correct in some sense; I think it is a bit more. First of all what is a singleton in a distributed system? It is merely a set of values that some threshold of participants have come to consensus on.  A Virtual Machine is a computational environment that is isolated from the physical computer and from other environments. A hypervisor allows the physical machine to be multiplexed... [Read More]

Blockchains are a powerful technology, as regular readers of the blog already likely agree. They allow for a large number of interactions to be codified and carried out in a way that greatly increases reliability, removes business and political risks associated with the process being managed by a central entity, and reduces the need for trust. They create a platform on which applications from different companies and even of different types can run together, allowing for extremely efficient and seamless... [Read More]

The time is gone, the song is over, Thought I’d something more to say. – Pink Floyd It is with no small amount of sadness that I must bid ye farewell. Like The Floyd’s work, in the time I’ve been involved with Ethereum, I’ve sampled the full gamut of emotion. From the amazement of meeting so many cool people (not least of whom Jani and Wendell) in Miami, Jan ‘14, to meeting Jeff for the first time in Feb ‘14... [Read More]

If DEVCON1 proved anything in spades, it was certainly the enthusiasm, creativity, and momentum of the Ethereum developer community. Utilizing the never-before-seen potential unleashed by the Ethereum World Computer, our small-but-growing community is not just re-imagining money (or even just re-imagining the Internet)… It is also re-imagining and delivering alternative models for re-organizing the very fabric of our society around a more transparent and inspectable “stack”. ÐΞVgrants came into existence on April 7, 2015, in order to ease some of... [Read More]

Now that Ethereum has launched and is rapidly nearing its Homestead phase, over the last few months we at the Ethereum Foundation have finally had the chance to have some breathing room and plan our strategies with a more long-term view. From a development perspective, we have now started in earnest the development of Serenity, the next large overhaul of the Ethereum protocol that will include powerful software abstraction features, the Casper consensus algorithm and hopefully some basic scaffolding that... [Read More]

Special thanks to Vlad Zamfir for introducing the idea of by-block consensus and convincing me of its merits, alongside many of the other core ideas of Casper, and to Vlad Zamfir and Greg Meredith for their continued work on the protocol In the last post in this series, we discussed one of the two flagship feature sets of Serenity: a heightened degree of abstraction that greatly increases the flexibility of the platform and takes a large step in moving Ethereum... [Read More]

Special thanks to Gavin Wood for prompting my interest into abstraction improvements, and Martin Becze, Vlad Zamfir and Dominic Williams for ongoing discussions. For a long time we have been public about our plans to continue improving the Ethereum protocol over time and our long development roadmap, learning from our mistakes that we either did not have the opportunity to fix in time for 1.0 or only realized after the fact. However, the Ethereum protocol development cycle has started up... [Read More]

This is the third and final post on a series on how to use the Ethereum Wallet to create your own autonomous organisations. On the first post we detailed how to create a token, and on the second we shown how to generate a digital democracy controlled by these tokens. Now we will do the full circle and create a token controlled by the Organisation! We are going to modify the token contract to allow it to be minted by... [Read More]