Author: Olivia Martinez
Hey everyone, I spent some time with our Canadian friends in Toronto after presenting “Ethereum: The World Computer” at Blockchain Training Conference last month and I wanted to provide a quick update on some of the exciting happenings in the Ethereum dev ecosystem. Lots of things are brewing behinds the scenes, so let’s jump in! Projects Mist Ethereum wallet has been refined significantly over the last several months expanding support to arbitrary contract interaction via the “custom contracts” tab. This is a massive improvement over sending transactions on the command line, as was often required in Frontier. With several new…
How to build server less applications for Mist | Ethereum Foundation BlogPosted by Alex Van de Sande on July 12, 2016Ethereum is not meant to be a platform to build esoteric smart contract applications that require a STEM degree to understand, but it aims to be one pillar of a different architecture for applications on the world wide web. With this post we will try to elucidate how this can be done and give some basic examples on how to start building a decentralized app. Who is this for? This text is intended at those who have a basic understanding…
The DAO, though not a product developed by the Ethereum Foundation, has been a hot topic as of late, both internally in the organisation as well as within our community. The Hard Fork is a delicate topic and the way we see it, no decision is the right one. As this is not a decision that can be made by the foundation or any other single entity, we again turn towards the community to assess its wishes in order to provide the most appropriate protocol change. The specification proposed for the hard fork that is being implemented in the Geth client is…
We would like to congratulate the Ethereum community on a successfully completed hard fork. Block 1920000 contained the execution of an irregular state change which transferred ~12 million ETH from the “Dark DAO” and “Whitehat DAO” contracts into the WithdrawDAO recovery contract. The fork itself took place smoothly, with roughly 85% of miners mining on the fork: You can see ongoing fork progress here. EthStats shows Go, Java and Parity (Rust) nodes successfully synchronized to the fork chain. The recovery contract is already returning DAO token holders’ ether; about 4.5 million ETH has been sent to DAO token holders, and…
The DAO soft-fork attempt was difficult. Not only did it turn out that we underestimated the side effects on the consensus protocol (i.e. DoS vulnerability), but we also managed to introduce a data race into the rushed implementation that was a ticking time bomb. It was not ideal, and even though averted at the last instance, the fast approaching hard-fork deadline looked eerily bleak to say the least. We needed a new strategy… The stepping stone towards this was an idea borrowed from Google (courtesy of Nick Johnson): writing up a detailed postmortem of the event, aiming to assess the root causes of the issue, focusing solely on…
tl;dr This week the EF announced the Eth2 Staking Community Grants round in an effort to support a more delightful staking experience. This is an open call for proposals for grants that aim to enhance all things staking — tools, documentation, educational resources, etc. Check it out for more details including a non-exhaustive wishlist. Proposals are due by December 22nd! v1.0 eth2 testnets — Toledo and Pyrmont This week, client developers led by protolambda launched the Toledo devnet — a 16k validator testnet with v1.0 mainnet configuration. Although you can sync up your favorite node to this testnet, you cannot…
The EF is excited to announce the results of the Medalla data challenge, a data hackathon focused on the Medalla testnet ✨ The prompt was open-ended: we asked for data tools, visualizations, and analyses of testnet data; in short, anything that would help the community make sense of all the data. Over the course of six weeks we received 23 submissions from a wide variety of teams. We were pleased to see high quality submissions for every category. Prizes are divided into three tiers based on scope, extensibility, and usefulness to the community. 🥇 Gold ($15k prize) Jim McDonald –…
It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll check in on projects that are well underway – or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones and achievements by grantees! Where applicable, the grant recipient is listed first, followed by the project for which the grant was awarded. Fuel Labs for Optimistic Rollup R&D, SparsENS Fuel Labs is best known for their work on a UTXO-based design for scalable, trust-minimized optimistic rollups. This multitasking team is also developing SparsENS, a stateless ENS…
Community & educationBlockchainsForSchoolsSponsorship of BlockchainsForHacks, an ideation challenge for high school and college students to create innovative projects using blockchain technology.Cryptography & zero knowledge proofsHubbleContinued funding for work on an optimistic rollup hub allowing creation of any rollup chain simply by writing a solidity function.Cryptography & zero knowledge proofsZkopru (zk-optimistic-rollup)Layer-2 scaling solution for private transactions using zk-SNARKs and optimistic rollup. Github: https://github.com/zkopru-network/zkopruCryptography & zero knowledge proofsDark ForestGame theorietic research completed by a group of Stanford students on using zk-SNARKs to construct “incomplete information” environments where users can keep a private state while publicly submitting verifiably valid actions. Dark Forest was…
While everyone is staring in amazement on December 1st, 12pm UTC anticipating the Eth 2.0 Beaconchain genesis, within the JavaScript team we quietly prepared our own little genesis release in the shadows. Being very much around the good ol’ Eth 1.0 chain we are nevertheless very much excited on this too. 😀 Some background story: the EthereumJS ecosystem around the VM consists of a very modular set of libraries (vm, blockchain, merkle-patricia-tree, tx,…), each encapsulating its own dedicated set of functionality. While this is great for the user, it turned out to be not so great for development since it…