Author: Sophia Brown
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 algorithm here: And a few blog posts from Yoichi formally proving correctness: And on “Vlad Casper”: And it’s not just…
Cramming in a lot more goodies than originally anticipated, the Go Ethereum team is proud to finally deliver the first incarnation of the 1.6 Geth release series! Glimpsing through the commit list, this is going to be a monster post! Toml configuration files For a very long time now, people were requesting that we support configuration files to aid in switching between different public and pirate chains. We didn’t focus much on private networks, so we’ve always pointed people towards using shell scripts in those cases. Although they are suitable for many scenarios, shell scripts aren’t portable across different operating…
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 PUSH32 0xfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffe, or choose to encode this as PUSH1 1; NOT;. An error in the optimizer made optimizations of byte…
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/14List 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 of the EIPs have been implemented in C++ and Python and are being implemented in other clients; tests are being actively written…
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 limit to 6.7 million. We at the Foundation have been rapidly putting additional resources toward increasing the efficiency of the…
The Foundation believes Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) should not be published as a W3C Recommendation, and we are now making public the formal objection the Ethereum Foundation submitted to the W3C opposing the recommendation of EME. As a member of the W3C, the Ethereum Foundation contributes to the standards-making process and votes on matters such as the EME recommendation. Many developers and researchers at the Ethereum Foundation conduct security research and build software that use web technology, and from that perspective, we have objections to EME as well as Digital Rights Management (DRM) in general. Most if not all people who use…
Development has steadily continued over the last month and a half as we approach the launch of Metropolis. Over a series of core dev calls over the last few months, we have specified and finalized the EIPs for Metropolis, and made the appropriate changes to the Yellow Paper. Metropolis has now been split up into two consecutive forks, named “Byzantium” and “Constantinople”. EIPs for Byzantium (Metropolis part one) are essentially finalized, and the last remaining work to be done has to do with writing tests and making sure that all clients are passing all tests. The Ethereum network continues to…
The Go Ethereum team is proud to announce the next release family of Geth, the first incarnation focusing on laying the groundwork for the upcoming Metropolis hard forks (Byzantium and Constantinople), consisting of 125+ code contributions for various parts of the project. Byzantium fork The current incarnation of Geth contains all the Byzantium EIPs implemented and also features the fork block number 1,700,000 for the Ropsten testnet transition. The block numbers for Rinkeby and the main Ethereum network will be finalized when Ropsten is deemed stable. You can find details about individual protocol updates at the following locations: Performance optimizations Aside…
Metropolis is finally (almost) here! The fork for Byzantium, the first and larger part of Metropolis, succeeded on the testnet over two weeks ago, and the likely date for the fork on the mainnet has been set to block 4.37 million, which is expected to be on Oct 17. New features include opcodes such as REVERT and RETURNDATACOPY, as well as precompiles that can be used to support a wide array of cryptographic algorithms. At the same time, we have been seeing many improvements to Ethereum core code, Whisper, Swarm as well as Ethereum’s future scaling plans. Casper PoC4 has been…
The Ethereum network will be undergoing a planned hard fork at block number 4.37mil (4,370,000), which will likely occur between 12:00 UTC and 13:00 UTC on Monday, October 16, 2017. The Ropsten test network underwent a hard fork on September 19th (UTC) at block number 1.7mil (1,700,000). A countdown timer can be seen at https://fork.codetract.io/. As a user, what do I need to do? Download the latest version of your Ethereum client: What if I am using a web or mobile Ethereum wallet like MyEtherWallet or Jaxx? Ethereum websites and mobile applications that allow you to store ether and/or make transactions are running…