Ethereum ÐΞV Update V by Gav

I was woken up by a call from Vitalik at 5:55 this morning. It was pitch dark outside, and the night was still ahead of us. Nonetheless, it was time to leave and this week it was best to start off on the right foot.

The 25-minute walk in the dark from Zug-based headquarters to the train station was a wet one. The streetlights reflecting off the puddles of the clean Swiss streets made for a quiet yet picturesque village parade. I couldn’t help but think that the rain streaming down my face was a very fluid sign of the impending change of seasons and how quickly the last nine months had passed.

a solid foundation

Last week was spent in Zug by the Ethereum Foundation Board of Directors and ÐΞV leadership. Vitalik, Mihai and Taylor officially formed the Foundation Board of Directors, Anthony and Joseph as other official advisors, and Aeron & Jutta joined as ÐΞV executives joined by Jeff and myself. ÐΞV and several hats of advisory). The main result of this was to publicize Vitalik’s brilliant plan to reform the Foundation and transform it into a professional institution. The Board of Directors is comprised of experienced professionals with minimal conflicts of interest. The current set of “founders” have officially retired from their positions and recruited professional executives, the latter process being led by Joseph. Anthony will take on an increased role as an ambassador for Ethereum in China and North America. Conversely, ÐΞV will function much more as a division of the Foundation’s leadership than as an independent entity. Finally, I presented the launch strategy to others. I haven’t seen so many photos taken with a whiteboard since. Needless to say, everything was well received by the board and advisors. More information will be available soon.

As I write this, I am sitting on a crowded, early commuter train. Vinay Gupta recently took on a much more hands-on role as Release Coordinator this week. He will help with launch strategy and keep you informed on the launch process. This week, which could rather dramatically be described as ‘pivotal’ in the release process, sees Jeff, Vitalk and I sitting around a table developing all the PoC-9 changes, associated unit tests and integrations in three days. Christoph, our indomitable test master. This week’s results will inform an announcement later this week that clearly explains what we will release and when.

I’m sorry it’s been so long without an update. The past two months have been somewhat busy with travel and meetings, and the remaining time has been spent coding, team leading, and management. The team is now practically formed. The formal security audit began four weeks ago. The bounty program is running smoothly. The latter process is in the very capable hands of Jutta and Gustav. Meanwhile, Aeron will step down from his position as head of finance and operations at ÐΞV and take on the systems modeling role he originally joined. We hope to announce his successor next week. (Yes, that’s plural. He’s been doing the work of 2.5 people over the past few months.)

We are also in the process of forming partnerships with third parties within the industry. George, Jutta and I are managing this process. We are excited to announce that at least three exchanges will support Ether from day one on their trading platforms (more details to come). More exchanges are expected to follow. Marek and Alex are there providing technical support, and Marek is even working on implementing a significant reference exchange implementation.

We also completed the first draft of ICAP, the Ethereum Inter-exchange Client Address Protocol. The protocol is an IBAN-compatible system for referencing and trading customer accounts, with the goal of streamlining the fund transfer process and ultimately making KYC worry-free between exchanges. AML is now a thing of the past. IBAN compatibility may also offer the possibility of easy integration with existing banking infrastructure in the future.

Development

Proof-of-concept releases VII and VIII have been released. NatSpec, a “natural language specification format” and the basis for transaction security, has been prototyped and integrated. Now, under the leadership of Marek with assistance from Fabian, ethereum.js is truly coming of age, with near source-level compatibility with Solidity for contract interaction and support for a typed ABI with calls and events. The latter provides hassle-free status change reporting. . Our IDE, Mix, has had its first release and after a few issues, it’s running great thanks to the great work of Arkadiy and Yann. Solidity has a ton of features added and is quickly approaching 1.0 status with Christian, Lefteris, and Liana. Marian’s work continues on the network monitoring system, while Sven and Heiko are working diligently on the stress testing infrastructure, analyzing and testing peer network formation and performance. Alex and Lefteris will soon join us to accelerate this program.

So one of the main things that needs to be sorted out for the next release is what proof-of-work algorithm we will use. There were a number of requirements here, two of which were actually pulling in opposite directions, but fundamentally it had to be a light client friendly algorithm where mining speed was proportional to IO bandwidth and required a significant amount of RAM. To do that. There was a vague consensus that we (well, Vitalik and Matthew) were heading in the direction of Hashimoto-like algorithms (proof-of-work designed for the Bitcoin blockchain targeting IO binding). To go faster, you need to add more memory than sponsor a smaller, faster ASIC. Because our blockchain has a number of important differences from the Bitcoin blockchain (mainly transaction density) due to the extremely short block time of 12 seconds that we are targeting, we do not use the blockchain data itself like Hashimoto, but artificially We need to use data. We used an algorithm called Dagger to generate the data set (yes, some will remember this as Vitalik’s first and flawed attempt at memory hard proof-of-work).

This seemed like a good idea, but a quick audit of Vitalik and Matt’s initial algorithm by Tim Hughes (former technical director at Frontier Developments and an expert in low-level CPU and GPU operations and optimization) revealed serious flaws. With his help, they were able to work together to devise a much more complete algorithm that would make the FPGA/ASIC development task sufficiently difficult, especially considering their decision to turn to proofs. We plan to build a staking system in the next 6-12 months.

The new homepage has finally been opened. Thanks to Ian and Konstantin for solving the problem and getting it done. The next stop is a developer site based on the excellent resources of qt.io. The site aims to be a one-stop destination for up-to-date reference documentation, curated tutorials, examples, recipes, downloads, issue tracking, and more. and build status.

after

So, as our networking guru Alex said, these are exciting times. When you get so deep into the nitty-gritty of development, you sometimes forget how much the technology you’re building is changing the world. This is probably the case because the gravity of the problem at hand is a constant distraction. Nonetheless, when you start to consider the short-term changes we can actually bring about, you realize that the wave of change is immediately inevitable and heading straight for you. For what it’s worth, I think a great accompaniment to this crazy life is Pretty Lights’ excellent music.