Roundup Q2

Thanks to all the developers and team leads who contributed to the sections on their projects In the last month and a half, the Ethereum network went through a rapid growth in usage, to the point that it now processes as many transactions per second a...
Cryptocurrency

Roundup Round III

Over the last month and a half we saw vigorous ongoing research and development on all sides of the Ethereum roadmap, and progress is rapidly starting to translate into real results that can be run and verified inside of an Ethereum client. On Metropo...
Cryptocurrency

Solidity optimizer bug

A bug in the Solidity optimizer was reported through the Ethereum Foundation Bounty program, by Christoph Jentzsch. This bug is patched as of 2017-05-03, with the release of Solidity 0.4.11....
Cryptocurrency

Geth 1.6 – Puppeth Master

Cramming in a lot more goodies than originally anticipated, the Go Ethereum team is proud to finally deliver the first incarnation of the 1.6 Geth release series! Glimpsing through the commit list, this is going to be a monster post!...
Cryptocurrency

Ethereum Dev Roundup: Q1 (Boring Edition)

The last one and a half months have seen great progress for Ethereum research, and we are excited that the protocol is moving closer and closer to the point where it is ready for mainstream adoption. Progress on consensus algorithms, privacy, zero know...
Cryptocurrency

Ethereum Dev Roundup: Q1

The last one and a half months have seen great progress for Ethereum research, and we are excited that the protocol is moving closer and closer to the point where it is ready for mainstream adoption. Progress on consensus algorithms, privacy, zero know...
Cryptocurrency

Ethereum JS Ecosystem Updates

It's been a fairly busy for the last couple of months for the Ethereum javascripters. To start with, there was a really great hackathon with IPFS. You can read Dan Finlay's excellent write up here. Also, during this time Aaron Davis (Kumavis) made s...
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 2

This chapter describes the game theory and economic security modelling we were doing in the Fall of 2014. It recounts how the "bribing attacker model" led our research directly to a radical solution to the long range attack problem....
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