Author: Michael Johnson

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…

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…