Author: Michael Johnson

The content of this tutorial is intended to apply to PoC5. Most of the instructions given below will not work in the older PoC4 implementations of AlethZero (C++) and Ethereal (Go) Over the last few weeks, we have made a large number of changes to the Ethereum protocol. POC4, introducing a large body of changes made by Gavin Wood and myself, was announced as an informal description two weeks ago, and has been formally specified in Gavin Wood’s “yellow paper” at http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf. The protocol spec did change substantially, but at the same time things are solidifying; we know why we…

BitMine buys 82,353 Ethereum tokens as holdings reach 3.4 million. Crypto and cash treasury stands at $13.7 billion. BitMine hits 2.8% of the targeted 5% of the Ethereum supply. BitMine Immersion Technologies, a leader in cryptocurrency mining and advanced cooling solutions, has significantly bolstered its position in the digital asset space. The company has revealed a substantial increase in its Ethereum (ETH) reserves. BitMine ETH holdings hit 3.4 million BitMine’s increasing commitment to Ethereum is again evident following another buy-the-dip move. Despite price declines, the publicly-listed company has bumped up its holdings to become the world’s second-largest corporate treasury strategy.…

Ether (ETH), the cryptofuel that powers distributed applications on the Ethereum platform, will be issued at a constant annual linear rate via the block mining process. This rate is 0.3 times the total amount of ETH that will be purchased in the pre-sale. While the best metaphor for ETH is “fuel for running the contract processing engine,” for the purposes of this post, we will treat ETH purely as a currency. There are two common definitions of “inflation.”  The first relates to prices and the second relates to the total amount of money in a system – the monetary base…

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…

The idea of releasing a new currency as a mechanism for funding protocol development is perhaps one of the most interesting economic innovations to come out of the cryptocurrency space. In the past twenty years, we have seen a growing centralization in the protocols that underlie the internet, with the rise of proprietary chat systems and social networks like Facebook, and a large part of the reason for this trend has been the need for monetization; if Facebook was cryptographically secure and decentralized, the developers would have no way to make money by data mining their users’ activities and taking…

The moved assets included StakeWise Staked Ether (OSETH), Wrapped Ether (WETH), and Lido wstETH (wSTETH). In September 2023, Balancer suffered a phishing attack that resulted in a loss of about $238,000. A separate August exploit drained nearly $1 million after a vulnerability was found in Balancer’s liquidity pools. A suspected exploit involving nearly $70 million worth of digital assets has once again placed Balancer, one of Ethereum’s leading decentralised exchanges, under scrutiny. The incident has reignited debate over the security of decentralised finance (DeFi), where transparency and automation often coexist with deep structural vulnerabilities. It also shows how core DeFi…

Over the past two weeks our primary focus has been getting all of the clients updated to PoC5 compatibility, and it definitely has been a long road. Among the changes to the VM include: The new init/code mechanism: basically, when you create a contract, the code provided will execute immediately, and then the return value of that code will be what becomes the contract’s code. This allows us to have contract initialization code, but still keep to the same format of [nonce, price, gas, to, value, data] for both transactions and contract creation, also making it easier to create new…

One of the most popular topics in the digital consensus space (a new term for cryptocurrency 2.0 that I’m beta-testing) is the concept of decentralized autonomous entities. There are now a number of groups rapidly getting involved in the space, including Bitshares (also known as Invictus Innovations) developing “decentralized autonomous companies”, BitAngels’ David Johnston with decentralized applications, our own concept of decentralized autonomous corporations which has since transformed into the much more general and not necessarily financial “decentralized autonomous organizations” (DAOs); all in all, it is safe to say that “DAOism” is well on its way to becoming a quasi-cyber-religion.…

What is Ethereum, the Project? The Ethereum Project is an open source, community-driven effort designed to create a next-generation distributed application platform intended to be maximally flexible and powerful in the possibilities that it enables. What is Ethereum, the Platform? The Ethereum Platform combines a generalized peer-to-peer networking platform with next-generation blockchain architecture to deliver a decentralized consensus-based (decentcon), full-stack platform for developing, offering and using distributed application services.  A consumer-facing application, called the EtherBrowser, integrates the front and back ends to create an environment in which anyone can easily and rapidly build highly secure, scalable and interoperable decentralized applications.…

The Necessity to Build and Launch an Ecosystem on Genesis Day Imagine if Microsoft released the Xbox and there were no games. On the day on which the Ethereum genesis block is created, many of the elements of the ecosystem — core infrastructure, mining network, user app browser and applications — will be in place.  Granted there will be an enormous amount of development to do beyond the genesis to craft Ethereum into a sophisticated, decentralized consensus (decentcon) application platform.  But on day one, there will be “launch titles.” Originally, when the idea behind Ethereum was conceived in November, the…