Author: Sophia Brown

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 director Andrew Keys will be present. Vitalik, Andrew and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the //Build pre-conference reception The integration…

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 with a first-in-its-class deflationary model, starting with a maximum supply of 20.9 million and then further reducing the supply by…

[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 three-segment format that allows people to attend any combination of days that best addresses their needs. Two new features include…

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 April and will continue improving the JIT. Greg joined in February and already achieved substantial speedups for the C++ implementation…

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 system can ever “go back” and revert that operation. Decentralized systems, depending on the specific nature of their design, may…

Affected configurations: All Go client versions  Likelihood: Very low Severity: High Details: A bug in Geth (and potentially other clients) may suffer from a DoS attack and allows remote attackers to stall synchronisation process almost indefinitely by supplying a valid, lighter chain. More information will be given out a later time including the report that was submitted through the bug bounty program. Effects on expected chain reorganisation depth: None Proposed temporary workaround: None Remedial action taken by Ethereum: Provision of hotfixes as below: If you’re using Mist: download the updated binary from the release page If using the PPA: sudo apt-get update then sudo apt-get upgrade If using brew: brew update then brew…

Affected configurations: cpp-ethereum (eth, AlethZero, …) version 1.2.0 up to 1.2.5 (fixed in 1.2.6) Note: Neither “geth” nor “Mist” nor the “Ethereum Wallet” (unless explicitly used together with cpp-ethereum) are affected by this, they lock accounts correctly again.Severity: HighPossible Attacks:</stro… Source link

The Ethereum Virtual machine is kind of different than most other Virtual Machines out there. In my previous post I already explained how it’s used and described some of its characteristics. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a simple but powerful, Turing complete 256bit Virtual Machine that allows anyone to execute arbitrary EVM Byte Code. The go-ethereum project contains two implementations of the EVM. A simple and straightforward byte-code VM and a more sophisticated JIT-VM. In this post I’m going to explain some of the differences between the two implementations and describe some of the characteristics of the JIT EVM and why it can be so…

Affected configurations: cpp-ethereum (eth, AlethZero, …) version 1.2.0 up to 1.2.6 Note: Neither “geth” nor “Mist” nor the “Ethereum Wallet” (unless explicitly used together with cpp-ethereum) are affected by this, they lock accounts correctly again. This is just a quick head’s up that cpp-ethereum’s security issue around account security is not yet properly fixed. The fix that is part of cpp-ethereum version 1.2.6 did not decrease the security, but it also did not fix the bug completely. We will work towards another bugfix release and announce it once the fix is properly verified. A fix is now available: Release 1.2.7…

Solidity was started in October 2014 when neither the Ethereum network nor the virtual machine had any real-world testing, the gas costs at that time were even drastically different from what they are now. Furthermore, some of the early design decisions were taken over from Serpent. During the last couple of months, examples and patterns that were initially considered best-practice were exposed to reality and some of them actually turned out to be anti-patterns. Due to that, we recently updated some of the Solidity documentation, but as most people probably do not follow the stream of github commits to that…