Author: Michael Johnson

Dear Ethereum community (and wonderful Etherheads!), Today, January 31, 2018, is my last day as Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation. I’m pleased to have been able to guide the Foundation as ED with my fellow directors, team leads, and outstanding group of team members, each of whom has contributed to our current position of strength. Taking the Foundation from what was an early stage startup to one of stability, with the infrastructure and resources to support the changes, improvements and challenges to come was no small feat in blockchain and cryptoland! We have gone through a lot together to…

It is with sadness that we announce that Ming Chan, who has served as Executive Director at the Ethereum Foundation for nearly three years, is leaving the Foundation. Since her arrival in 2015, she has played a critical role in the development and success of the Foundation. We will miss the leadership, commitment and integrity that she brought to the Foundation, and wish to thank her for her dedicated service and many significant accomplishments including: Multiple rounds of reorganization for the Foundation, as well as significantly improving efficiency and reducing costsBuilding relationships with IC3 and other academic groupsNavigating and supporting the…

After waaay too much time under development, we’re proud to finally announce version 1.8.0 of the Go Ethereum client: Iceberg! The release fixes a lot of pain points felt by the community and ships a few notable new features, tallying up to ~170 modifications! Please note, this release introduces a few breaking changes that may affect certain power users! If you are running a production setup, make sure you read the “Breaking changes” section at the end of this blog post! Client synchronization A huge amount of work went into this release that isn’t immediately visible, rather they’re under the…

We’re excited to share the results of the first wave of grants from the Ethereum Foundation. As a reminder, the Ethereum project seeks to support useful dapps and smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and the goal of the Ethereum Foundation is to empower developers with best-in-class R&D, developer experience, and education. Despite the early promise of the ecosystem, we still have a long way to go, and we are here to work with the community to drive concrete progress. These grants will fuel the teams working hard at research & development to support the entire ecosystem. Furthermore, we hope…

We have long recognized that in order for cryptocurrency to reach mass adoption, a form of cryptocurrency that has higher price stability than existing cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH would be needed so that people can use the currency to store funds and engage in commerce without worrying about their monthly salary dropping by 57% between the time they receive it and the time they can use the money to buy products. Unfortunately, we’ve found that the existing stablecoins all have various flaws; Tether is unauditable, Nubits has already once collapsed in price, Seignorage Shares is after three years still just a…

Thank you all for applying, and we’re excited to announce the latest Ethereum Foundation grants! We funded 22 recipients for a total of $2.84M. Apply here for the next round! 🦄 Background The Ethereum project seeks to support useful dapps and smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and the goal of the Ethereum Foundation is to empower developers with best-in-class R&D, developer experience, and education. Despite the early promise of the ecosystem, we still have a long way to go, and we are here to work with the community to drive concrete progress. These grants will fuel the teams working…

Přátelé, Now that we’re well into the year, we know that many of you have started to plan ahead for changing weather, holiday celebrations, and (of course) Devcon! We’re excited to announce today that Devcon4 will take place in Prague from 30 October – 02 November of this year. The first iteration of this conference took place in 2014 as a classroom-sized gathering in Berlin called Devcon0. There, the first visions of what Ethereum would come to be were presented to core developers and founding team members. Four years later, Devcon has become the most anticipated gathering for blockchain application…

The Swarm Team is pleased to announce the immediate release of Swarm client v0.3, the third proof-of-concept release (POC3) of the Ethereum Swarm client. The POC3 code is now merged into the official go-ethereum repository’s master branch. Swarm 0.3 has been deployed to the public Testnet, and the Ethereum Foundation is running a 50-node strong cluster of Swarm nodes together with a public web gateway on https://swarm-gateways.net. We welcome everyone to try it out or commit to operate stable nodes. The past year It has been a year and a half since the first release of the POC2 series was…

Friends, Today, we’re happy to announce some significant updates to the Devcon4 website, and with it we wanted to unveil a bit about the ticketing and discount processes and more! Applications for scholarships and builder & student discounts are now open! We hope that expediting this process for builders, students, and potential scholars prior to the release of general tickets will help fast-track approvals and ensure that Devcon grows more diverse, accessible and equitable, even with increased demand. Then on July 9, 2018, the first wave* of general tickets will go on sale. To ensure that tickets are not bulk-reserved,…

Friends, It has been an exciting week! We initiated our first wave of ticket sales and sold out in just 18 minutes! Don’t worry though, there will be more ticketing waves in addition to a variety of discounts and scholarships that you can still apply for. Transparency and clear communication are things the Devcon team strives for so we wanted to share some of our thinking behind Devcon4 ticket allocations and sales in hopes of answering the questions and addressing the feedback we’ve received from the community. Ticket Distribution and Revenue Allocation First up: Over two thirds of Devcon4 tickets…