Author: Michael Johnson

This past week, just over 100 Ethereum core contributors gathered above the Arctic Circle — in Longyearbyen, Svalbard — for the Soldøgn Interop: a week of intense work on the Glamsterdam network upgrade. Soldøgn followed last year’s Berlinterop, but returned to the format used by Amphora 🏺, Edelweiss 🏔️, and Nyota ✨: a single-track week of focused, multi-client progress toward a specific upgrade — in this case, hardening Glamsterdam. By Friday, the group had delivered on its three core goals: alignment on a post-Glamsterdam gas limit floor of 200M, stable ePBS implementations running with external builders, and final EIP-8037 repricing…

TL;DR: We are excited to announce that applications are now open for the seventh cohort of the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship (EPF7). EPF provides a pathway for aspiring protocol developers to make meaningful contributions to Ethereum. In each cohort, a diverse group is assembled to work toward advancing Ethereum’s roadmap focused on the core properties that define Ethereum; censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security. This includes the development of client implementations, testing and specifications, and engaging with the latest core protocol research. With an overarching goal of finding placement for fellows in R&D teams working on core protocol development, EPF…

Application InfrastructureDeveloper toolingEthereumJS maintenanceMaintenance for the EthereumJS TypeScript stack to ensure reliability and compatibility with execution-layer changes. This includes implementing protocol updates, improving tests, and supporting downstream developers.LinkApplication layerResearchProtecting Ethereum User Anonymity via TorEnhances Ethereum light client privacy by integrating Tor. This project designs and implements a Tor-based mitigation scheme, improving user anonymity and network resilience.Application layerEcosystem developmentERC-8004 Developers EngagementFosters ERC-8004 community growth by providing technical assistance and coordinating builder engagement. Supports decentralized AI engineers through direct feedback and Devconnect event curation.Application layerDeveloper toolingBuidlGuidl: AI-Ready Ethereum Education & Infrastructure MaintenanceTransitions flagship Ethereum education and developer tools, including SpeedRunEthereum and Scaffold-ETH…

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…