Author: Michael Johnson
With the long awaited geth 1.5 (“let there bee light”) release, Swarm made it into the official go-ethereum release as an experimental feature. The current version of the code is POC 0.2 RC5 — “embrace your daemons” (roadmap), which is the refactored and cleaner version of the codebase that was running on the Swarm toynet in the past months. The current release ships with the swarmcommand that launches a standalone Swarm daemon as separate process using your favourite IPC-compliant ethereum client if needed. Bandwidth accounting (using the Swarm Accounting Protocol = SWAP) is responsible for smooth operation and speedy content…
On December 16, we were made aware that someone had recently gained unauthorized access to a database from forum.ethereum.org. We immediately launched a thorough investigation to determine the origin, nature, and scope of this incident. Here is what we know: The information that was recently accessed is a database backup from April 2016 and contained information about 16.5k forum users.The leaked information includes Messages, both public and privateIP-addressesUsername and email addressesProfile informationHashed passwords ~13k bcrypt hashes (salted)~1.5k Wordpress-hashes (salted)~2k accounts without passwords (used federated login) The attacker self-disclosed that they are the same person/persons who recently hacked Bo Shen.The attacker…
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 moving forward, and discussions on protocol economics and community governance continue to mature. First, privacy technologies on Ethereum, and particularly zk-SNARKs (or “zero knowledge proofs”), have been rapidly moving forward. Vlad Zamfir has taken it upon himself to explain the history behind Casper, from his point of view: On proof of stake from myself: Vlad has also taken it upon himself to rail against…
The first version of the Light Ethereum Subprotocol (LES/1) and its implementation in Geth are still in an experimental stage, but they are expected to reach a more mature state in a few months where the basic functions will perform reliably. The light client has been designed to function more or less the same as a full client, but the “lightness” has some inherent limitations that DApp developers should understand and consider when designing their applications. In most cases a properly designed application can work even without knowing what kind of client it is connected to, but we are looking into…
Members of the Ethereum R&D team and the Zcash Company are collaborating on a research project addressing the combination of programmability and privacy in blockchains. This joint post is being concurrently posted on the Zcash blog, and is coauthored by Ariel Gabizon (Zcash) and Christian Reitwiessner (Ethereum). Ethereum’s flexible smart contract interface enables a large variety of applications, many of which have probably not yet been conceived. The possibilities grow considerably when adding the capacity for privacy. Imagine, for example, an election or auction conducted on the blockchain via a smart contract such that the results can be verified by any…
During the last month and a half, the Ethereum core development and research teams have been building upon the progress made in the last year, and with the specter of last year’s security issues now well behind us, work has begun in full force on implementing the Metropolis hard fork. First, ongoing progress on the collaboration with the Zcash team and the implementation of zk-SNARKs: On the proof of stake front, myself and Vlad and others have continued to solidify the Casper specification and converge on a roadmap. A key focus of our work has been on a notion of…
Since January 2019, the Ethereum Foundation has held a tradition of engaging directly with the community through our “Ask Us Anything” (AMA) series on Reddit, occurring roughly every six months. These AMAs, previously hosted by the EF Research team, have provided a forum for deep dives into the protocol’s evolving landscape, direct Q&A with core contributors, and a transparent look into the ongoing work shaping Ethereum. We are excited to announce the continuation of this tradition. The next AMA will be hosted by the EF Protocol cluster teams, reflecting the evolution of our organizational structure. While “EF Research” accurately described…
Since announcing the Trillion Dollar Security project, we have surveyed the ecosystem to understand which improvements are highest priority to every layer of the Ethereum stack and community. Now it is time to begin the next phase of this initiative: acting on the highest priority issues we face. For this first wave of actions, we will mostly focus on UX issues. Our research showed these to be the most urgent issues facing both individual and institutional users of Ethereum and Ethereum-based applications. During this first wave we will kick off a range of work targeting crucial areas in UX security.…
Starting with the upcoming Fusaka hard fork, EIP-7825 introduces a per-transaction gas limit cap of 2²⁴ (≈ 16.78 million gas). This change is already live on Holesky and Sepolia, and will activate on mainnet with Fusaka. Developers and users who rely on very large transactions should verify that their contracts and transaction builders conform to the new cap. Background As Ethereum scales to higher block gas limits and prepares for parallel execution (e.g. EIP-7928 in Glamsterdam), the Fusaka fork introduces a per-transaction gas limit cap. Previously, a single transaction could consume the entire block gas limit (~45 million gas), creating…
Over the past few years, the Ethereum ecosystem has grown in depth, diversity, and maturity. Builders and communities worldwide have pushed the boundaries of what’s possible, creating new tools, protocols, and public goods that strengthen the network as a whole. As the ecosystem grows, our approach to supporting it must adapt as well. Today, we’re excited to share the next step in that journey: the Ecosystem Support Program’s (ESP) new grants program. This announcement builds on our earlier update, where we temporarily paused open grant applications to reassess our priorities and funding approach. During this time, we focused on designing…