Ethereum Toronto Meetup

September 3, 2014

Paul Paschos

Agenda

• Ether Sale Update

• Intended Use of Revenue

• State of Ethereum

• What’s new in PoC 6

What is Ethereum?

Ether Sale Update

• Sale is now over

• 60,102,216 ETH Sold

• 31,529.36369551 BTC

• Average Price 1906 ETH/BTC

Intended Use of Revenue(USD)

• Figures based on assumption of $14M USD Revenue.

• See http://goo.gl/OIEewu for full spreadsheet of expenses

Projected Launch

• Scaling up team (mostly developers)

• Aim for genesis block sometime this Winter (that’s March 20th or before)

State of Ethereum – August

• C++, Go, Python clients are now perfectly interoperable and processing the same blockchain

• Java client is almost done

• Web tech UI enabling HTML / Java interfaces

• Decentralized Exchange is up and running on testnet

Current Challenges

• Software is inefficient

• The UI underdeveloped

• Networking-level inefficiencies and vulnerabilities

•  Risk of security holes and consensus failures

Absolute Deliverables Needed to Launch

1. Protocol and network-level security testing (it needs to be secure)

2. Virtual machine efficiency upgrades (it needs to be inexpensive to run arbitrary contracts)

3. Inter-client compatibility needs to be proves through formal and widespread testing (it needs be bug free)

4. Finalized consensus (i.e. mining) algorithm

Wish list: Developer Experience Improvements

• Easy-to-use tools for building decentralized applications

• Contract standard libraries

• Better user interfaces

• Light clients

Proof of Concept 6

• Microchains

• Async Calls (POST)

• Native Contract Extensions

• Stateless Contracts

Microchains

• Based off work of Max Kaye (https://xk.io/)

• Provides a shared scalable PoW ‘container’ - a chain meant for nothing else but wrapping data in a PoW. 

• Blockchains without state progression

• Generalized way for doing merged mining

• Precursor to a full scalability solution

Async Calls (POST)

• Normally a function call gets executed immediately; nothing happens until a call is finished

• Async calls goes off to another queue allowing contract to continue execution and come back to call later

Native Contract Extentions

• Reduced Instruction Set (RISC) vs. Complex Instruction Set (CISC) • RISC in virtual machine, limited to basic memory, storage and

blockchain interaction, sub-calls and arithmetic • CISC features such as elliptic curve signature verification, a wider

library of hash algorithms, bloom filters, and data structures such as heaps.

• Implementing RISC reduces risk of security and consensus failures• Implementing CISC greatly increases efficiency• Native Contract extensions allow CISC features to be called without

expensive execution on the blockchain

Stateless Contracts

• A contract has an ether balance, a nonce, the code to be executed, and a state (memory)

• Stateless contracts have all of the above and no state.

• Useful for code reuse in writing contracts. Reuse: complex operations, data structures, linked lists.. existing contract just calls the stateless contract.

Mining

• PoW• Based on work by Vlad Zamfir• Current implementation is to randomly generate

a new circuit every 1000 nonces• A generalized computer is needed to solve a

random circuit• Estimated release: PoC 7