Cryptocurrency

December Roundup

December marks a month of continued progress in the Ethereum ecosystem. Research on proof of stake and sharding continues after the research team's workshop in Singapore in November, the light client slowly keeps getting better, Whisper and Swarm keep ...
Cryptocurrency

The History of Casper – Chapter 1

Vitalik suggested last week that I share my basic research and design philosophy in a blog post, I agreed but complained that it was still changing. My friend Jon West told me that everyone would really appreciate it if I told everyone about my Casper ...
Cryptocurrency

zkSNARKs in a nutshell

The possibilities of zkSNARKs are impressive, you can verify the correctness of computations without having to execute them and you will not even learn what was executed - just that it was done correctly. Unfortunately, most explanations of zkSNARKs re...
Cryptocurrency

Ethereum Research Update

This week marks the completion of our fourth hard fork, Spurious Dragon, and the subsequent state clearing process, the final steps in the two-hard-fork solution to the recent Ethereum denial of service attacks that slowed down the network in September...
Cryptocurrency

Hard Fork No. 4: Spurious Dragon

The Ethereum network will be undergoing a hard fork at block number 2,675,000, which will likely occur between 15:00 and 16:00 UTC on Tuesday, November 22, 2016. A countdown timer can be seen at https://fork.codetract.io/. The Morden test network will ...
Cryptocurrency

Whoa… Geth 1.5

The Go Ethereum team is very proud to finally release Geth 1.5, which can almost be called a complete internal rewrite of the Go Ethereum (go-ethereum) codebase. We've packed a huge number of changes into this release, and simply listing them wouldn't...
Cryptocurrency

Analysis of Storage Corruption Bug

This blog post provides an update on our findings following the discovery of the storage corruption bug last week. In summary, the bug was much less severe than we initially thought. The small number of affected contracts we found is either only exploi...
Cryptocurrency

Uncle Rate and Transaction Fee Analysis

One of the important indicators of how much load the Ethereum blockchain can safely handle is how the uncle rate responds to the gas usage of a transaction. In all blockchains of the Satoshian proof-of-work variety, any block that is published has the ...
Cryptocurrency

FAQ: Upcoming Ethereum Hard Fork

The Ethereum network will be undergoing a hard fork at block number 2463000, which will likely occur between 12:00 and 13:00 UTC on Tuesday, October 18, 2016. A countdown timer can be seen at https://fork.codetract.io/....
Cryptocurrency

Transaction spam attack: Next Steps

Today the network was attacked by a transaction spam attack that repeatedly called the EXTCODESIZE opcode (see trace sample here), thereby creating blocks that take up to 20-60 seconds to validate due to the 50,000 disk fetches needed to process the tr...
Cryptocurrency

Dev Update: Formal Methods

Today, I am delighted to announce that Yoichi Hirai (pirapira on github) is joining the Ethereum project as a formal verification engineer. He holds a PhD from the University of Tokyo on the topic of formalizing communicating parallel processes and cre...
Cryptocurrency

Onward from the Hard Fork

The foundation has committed to support the community consensus on the admittedly difficult hard fork decision. Seeing the results of various metrics, including carbonvote, dapp and ecosystem infrastructure adoption, this means that we will focus our r...
Cryptocurrency

Hive: How we strived for a clean fork

The DAO soft-fork attempt was difficult. Not only did it turn out that we underestimated the side effects on the consensus protocol (i.e. DoS vulnerability), but we also managed to introduce a data race into the rushed implementation that was a ticking...
Cryptocurrency

Hard Fork Completed

We would like to congratulate the Ethereum community on a successfully completed hard fork. Block 1920000 contained the execution of an irregular state change which transferred ~12 million ETH from the "Dark DAO" and "Whitehat DAO" contracts into the W...
Cryptocurrency

To fork or not to fork

The DAO, though not a product developed by the Ethereum Foundation, has been a hot topic as of late, both internally in the organisation as well as within our community. The Hard Fork is a delicate topic and the way we see it, no decision is the right ...
Cryptocurrency

Taylor’s Summer Update

Hey everyone, I spent some time with our Canadian friends in Toronto after presenting "Ethereum: The World Computer" at Blockchain Training Conference last month and I wanted to provide a quick update on some of the exciting happenings in the Ethereum ...
Cryptocurrency

C++ DEV Update – July edition

Since the last C++ DEV Update, a lot of things happened in the engine room which were not really visible to the outside. This post wants to give an overview about what we are currently working on. Apart from the features side, Bob has been working on ...
Cryptocurrency