Ethereum has been sailing in the blockchain deep sea for quite a while. It has dropped anchor beginning Q2 this year. Since then it has survived occasional high tide low tide and has been sailing smooth for some time. Previous quarter was venturesome for Ethereum. Lot of Ethereum based ICOs raised millions of dollars for startups, but it affected the regular transaction. Before Ethereum could recover with the tide of ICO, it has to bear the shock of DDoS attack on major exchanges Kraken and Poloniex. Then came the ‘flash crash’ of Ethereum on Coinbase – GDAX, where ETH price dipped from $318 to $0.10. This was not the end of fight for the survival of Ethereum, but Vitalik Buterin , the founder of Ethereum foundation too. Vitalik met with ‘rumored death’ after which he then condemned it in his own style. With all these ups and down today, July 08, 2017, he published ‘Roundup Q2’, the Q2 report for Ethereum foundation.

In the last month and a half, the Ethereum network went through a rapid growth in usage. It now processes as many transactions per second as Bitcoin. To accommodate the increased load, gas limit is increased to 6.7 million. Ethereum Foundation has been rapidly putting additional resources toward increasing the efficiency of the network, alongside planning longer-term changes that will greatly increase the network’s scalability.

Q2 achievements in nutshell

  • Involved in a number of research, and discussed various topics to do with Casper, sharding and Ethereum protocol economics.

  • Metropolis testing is rapidly moving forward and they are actively seeking additional help with finishing testing.

  • Mist team had a team meetup to share details on projects and talk about the current codebase and future roadmap.

  • Team is working on features that could implement to help prevent user errors and other related issues, including more options for node switching (including Infura support) and better options for account management (including HD wallets and mnemonic seeds – but with a twist).

  • Whisper v5 is currently only available in geth. They are currently adding swarm.js and finishing the JavaScript account management

  • For security of network, bounty submissions are going on for vulnerabilities in EthereumJS, Solidity and Cpp-ethereum.

  • Discussion and critique EVM 1.5 are being welcomed.

  • The ethereumJS team is still looking for community contributors to help the Ethereum Javascript client reach Metropolis compatibility.

  • New algorithms have been designed and implemented in order to improve log searching performance in the next version of the LES protocol (Light client).

  • The main Remix feature in the last month is the alpha release of Remixd.

  • Improving the UI interface is in progress.The Contract and Debugger tab are going to be quite nicely improved.

  • ENS integration has started, including a number of bug fixes.

  • The progress in the eth-isabelle project (formal verification) was mostly from external contributions.

  • Bamboo - End-to-end testing of the compiler is in progress.

  • In Solidity, a new feature is added makes it much easier to write tools that would otherwise need a custom-made parser. The next feature will be to also re-import this data after potential modifications, which would allow things like mutation testing.

  • The swarm team has onboarded new members and held an in-person Swarm Summit in Berlin in June, 2017. To support non-committing nodes and mobile clients, swarm will offer various light modes of operation.

  • In cooperation with the Remix team, the implementation of a fully distributed integrated contract development environment is underway.

The next major release, POC 0.3 is scheduled to come out around Metropolis and will include obfuscation support for plausible deniability, a rewrite of the swap peer-to-peer accounting for bandwidth incentivisation among other things.

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