Author: Olivia Martinez

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…

The foundation has committed to support the community consensus on the admittedly difficult hard fork decision. Seeing the results of various metrics, including carbonvote, dapp and ecosystem infrastructure adoption, this means that we will focus our resources and attention on the chain which is now called ETH (ie. the fork chain). That said, we recognize that the Ethereum code can be used to instantiate other blockchains with the same consensus rules, including testnets, consortium and private chains, clones and spinoffs, and have never been opposed to such instantiations. All users who had ETH before block 1920000 now have both ETH…

The primary expense that must be paid by a blockchain is that of security. The blockchain must pay miners or validators to economically participate in its consensus protocol, whether proof of work or proof of stake, and this inevitably incurs some cost. There are two ways to pay for this cost: inflation and transaction fees. Currently, Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two leading proof-of-work blockchains, both use high levels of inflation to pay for security; the Bitcoin community presently intends to decrease the inflation over time and eventually switch to a transaction-fee-only model. NXT, one of the larger proof-of-stake blockchains, pays…

I’m joining Ethereum as a formal verification engineer. My reasoning: formal verification makes sense as a profession only in a rare situation where the verification target follows short, simple rules (EVM);the target carries lots of value (Eth and other tokens);the target is tricky enough to get right (any nontrivial program);and the community is aware that it’s important to get it right (maybe). My last job as a formal verification engineer prepared me for this challenge. Besides, around Ethereum, I’ve been playing with two projects: an online service called Dr. Y’s Ethereum Contract Analyzer and a github repository containing Coq proofs.…

Security Alert Affected configurations: Geth Likelihood: High Severity: High Summary: geth nodes running out of memory and crashing on block https://etherchain.org/block/2283416 Details: TBD Solution: Geth 1.4.12 was released. Please update ASAP. Source link