Author: Michael Johnson

The Foundation believes Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) should not be published as a W3C Recommendation, and we are now making public the formal objection the Ethereum Foundation submitted to the W3C opposing the recommendation of EME.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…

A note from the ED: A big thanks to our attending dev community, presenters, internal team, sponsors, enthusiasts, volunteers, event team, students and other stakeholders for coming together for another phenomenal Devcon3! First of all, yes, video of all sessions, both from the Main Hall and Breakout Hall will be posted on the Ethereum Foundation YouTube channel as soon as our post production team can finish them. This year I contracted and brought a post production team to the venue with us so they could start work onsite as soon as the raw footage could be handed over. Since we had two…

To accommodate the biggest post-devcon request, we’re happy to announce that Devcon3 videos are now available for viewing! As promised, we recorded sessions from both the main hall and breakout hall on all four days of Devcon3. Given we had two halls instead of one this year, and also added a full forth day of presentations, we’re pleased to provide the complete recorded sessions in a fraction of the time it took last year.  Camerawork and raw footage was cleaner this year, and it helped to bring the post production team onsite to expedite producing and posting the videos. See the Ethereum Foundation…

Due to a Chromium vulnerability affecting all released versions of the Mist Browser Beta v0.9.3 and below, we are issuing this alert warning users not to browse untrusted websites with Mist Browser Beta at this time. Users of “Ethereum Wallet” desktop app are not affected. Affected configurations: Mist Browser Beta v0.9.3 and below Likelihood: Medium Severity: High Malicious websites can potentially steal your private keys. As Ethereum Wallet desktop app does not qualify as a browser — it accesses only the local Wallet Dapp — it is not subject to the same category of issues present in Mist. For now,…

Ethereum has grown very rapidly in the last few months. Transaction volume on the blockchain has more than doubled, surpassing 10 transactions per second for days at a time. The number of new accounts created per day passed 100,000, and the number of nodes has increased despite rising system requirements. As attention and interest in the blockchain space as a whole continues to hit new highs, we are entering a new phase in the industry’s growth: the phase where we are finally going from experiments and tests to real, live applications. Casper Sharding Py-EVM EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) We merged…

The Ethereum community, key developers and researchers and others have always recognized scalability as perhaps the single most important key technical challenge that needs to be solved in order for blockchain applications to reach mass adoption. Blockchain scalability is difficult primarily because a typical blockchain design requires every node in the network to process every transaction, which limits the transaction processing capacity of the entire system to the capacity of a single node. There are two main paths to improving blockchain scalability. The first (“sharding”) involves creating better-designed base-layer blockchain protocols, which still maintain most of the desired decentralization and…