Author: Michael Johnson
Today, we are announcing a transition in the executive leadership team at the Ethereum Foundation. After extensive contributions to the Foundation’s mission and operations, Tomasz Stańczak has decided to step down from his role as Co-Executive Director. The Foundation’s Board has appointed Bastian Aue to serve as interim Co-Executive Director, effective immediately. Tomasz joined the management team during a critical period of growth and maturation for the Foundation. His strategic guidance helped expand our ability to reach out to broad groups of people and teams, and for the EF to understand businesses in the ecosystem more deeply. He also brought…
tl;dr I am stepping down from my co-ED role at the EF at the end of February 2026. Bastian Aue is taking over the co-ED role alongside Hsiao-Wei. The future is bright for builders, for Ethereum, for the EF, and for me. Future of Ethereum As competing ideas emerge and fail and the markets jump up and down, we have never been given too much certainty. The conviction about Ethereum that comes from a deep understanding of its technology, its governance, its meaning for the future, and the values we share will always make us converge intermittently, even when our…
Corporations, US presidential candidate Mitt Romney reminds us, are people. Whether or not you agree with the conclusions that his partisans draw from that claim, the statement certainly carries a large amount of truth. What is a corporation, after all, but a certain group of people working together under a set of specific rules? When a corporation owns property, what that really means is that there is a legal contract stating that the property can only be used for certain purposes under the control of those people who are currently its board of directors – a designation itself modifiable by…
In the first part of this series, we talked about how the internet allows us to create decentralized corporations, automatons that exist entirely as decentralized networks over the internet, carrying out the computations that keep them “alive” over thousands of servers. As it turns out, these networks can even maintain a Bitcoin balance, and send and receive transactions. These two capacities: the capacity to think, and the capacity to maintain capital, are in theory all that an economic agent needs to survive in the marketplace, provided that its thoughts and capital allow it to create sellable value fast enough to…
In the first two parts of this series, we talked about what the basic workings of a decentralized autonomous corporation might look like, and what kinds of challenges it might need to deal with to be effective. However, there is still one question that we have not answered: what might such corporations be useful for? Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik once suggested that one application migh be a sort of decentralized Dropbox, where users can upload their files to a resilient peer-to-peer network that would be incentivized to keep those files reliably backed up. But aside from this particular example, what…
The purpose of this post is not to say that Ethereum will be using Slasher in place of Dagger as its main mining function. Rather, Slasher is a useful construct to have in our war chest in case proof of stake mining becomes substantially more popular or a compelling reason is provided to switch. Slasher may also benefit other cryptocurrencies that wish to exist independently of Ethereum. Special thanks to tacotime for some inspiration, and for Jack Walker for improvement suggestions. Proof of stake mining has for a long time been a large area of interest to the cryptocurrency community.…
I first wrote the initial draft of the Ethereum whitepaper on a cold day in San Francisco in November, as a culmination of months of thought and often frustrating work into an area that we have come to call “cryptocurrency 2.0″ – in short, using the Bitcoin blockchain for more than just money. In the months leading up to the development of Ethereum, I had the privilege to work closely with several projects attempting to implement colored coins, smart property, and various types of decentralized exchange. At the time, I was excited by the sheer potential that these technologies could…
Important notice: any information from this post regarding the ether sale is highly outdated and probably inaccurate. Please only consult the latest blog posts and official materials at ethereum.org for information on the sale Ethereum received an incredible response at the Miami Bitcoin Conference. We traveled there anticipating many technical questions as well as a philosophical discussion about the purpose of Ethereum; however, the overwhelming amount of interest and enthusiasm for the project was much larger than we had anticipated. Vitalik’s presentation was met with both a standing ovation and a question queue that took hours to address. Because we…
Of all the parts of the Ethereum protocol, aside from the mining function the fee structure is perhaps the least set in stone. The current values, with one crypto operation taking 20 base fees, a new transaction taking 100 base fees, etc, are little more than semi-educated guesses, and harder data on exactly how much computational power a database read, an arithmetic operation and a hash actually take will certainly give us much better estimates on what exactly the ratios between the different computational fees should be. The other part of the question, that of exactly how much the base…
This post will provide the groundwork for a major rework of the Ethereum scripting language, which will substantially modify the way ES works although still keeping many of the core components working in the exact same way. The rework is necessary as a result of multiple concerns which have been raised about the way the language is currently designed, primarily in the areas of simplicity, optimization, efficiency and future-compatibility, although it does also have some side-benefits such as improved function support. This is not the last iteration of ES2; there will likely be many incremental structural improvements that can be…