Author: Michael Johnson
The first version of the Light Ethereum Subprotocol (LES/1) and its implementation in Geth are still in an experimental stage, but they are expected to reach a more mature state in a few months where the basic functions will perform reliably. The light client has been designed to function more or less the same as a full client, but the “lightness” has some inherent limitations that DApp developers should understand and consider when designing their applications. In most cases a properly designed application can work even without knowing what kind of client it is connected to, but we are looking into…
Members of the Ethereum R&D team and the Zcash Company are collaborating on a research project addressing the combination of programmability and privacy in blockchains. This joint post is being concurrently posted on the Zcash blog, and is coauthored by Ariel Gabizon (Zcash) and Christian Reitwiessner (Ethereum). Ethereum’s flexible smart contract interface enables a large variety of applications, many of which have probably not yet been conceived. The possibilities grow considerably when adding the capacity for privacy. Imagine, for example, an election or auction conducted on the blockchain via a smart contract such that the results can be verified by any…
During the last month and a half, the Ethereum core development and research teams have been building upon the progress made in the last year, and with the specter of last year’s security issues now well behind us, work has begun in full force on implementing the Metropolis hard fork. First, ongoing progress on the collaboration with the Zcash team and the implementation of zk-SNARKs: On the proof of stake front, myself and Vlad and others have continued to solidify the Casper specification and converge on a roadmap. A key focus of our work has been on a notion of…
It’s been a fairly busy for the last couple of months for the Ethereum javascripters. To start with, there was a really great hackathon with IPFS. You can read Dan Finlay’s excellent write up here. Also, during this time Aaron Davis (Kumavis) made some excellent progress towards a JS light client by utilizing IPFS’s libp2p to build a in-browser mesh network and IPLD to provide the merklization layer. This will be important work in the future for building pure in-browser clients. Also Casey Detrio worked on a standard json RPC test suite, which you can see the results of here. After the Seattle Meetup,…
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… Source link
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… Source link
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…