Thinking About Smart Contract Security

Over the last day with the community’s help we have crowdsourced a list of all of the major bugs with smart contracts on Ethereum so far, including both the DAO as well as various smaller 100-10000 ETH thefts and losses in games and token contracts. T…

CRITICAL UPDATE Re: DAO Vulnerability

An attack has been found and exploited in the DAO, and the attacker is currently in the process of draining the ether contained in the DAO into a child DAO. The attack is a recursive calling vulnerability,

Smart Contract Security

Solidity was started in October 2014 when neither the Ethereum network nor the virtual machine had any real-world testing, the gas costs at that time were even drastically different from what they are now. Furthermore, some of the early design decision…

Go Ethereum’s JIT-EVM

The Ethereum Virtual machine is kind of different than most other Virtual Machines out there. In my previous post I already explained how it’s used and described some of its characteristics. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a simple but powe…

Security Alert – cpp-ethereum keeps accounts unlocked

Affected configurations: cpp-ethereum (eth, AlethZero, …) version 1.2.0 up to 1.2.5 (fixed in 1.2.6) Note: Neither “geth” nor “Mist” nor the “Ethereum Wallet” (unless explicitly used together with cpp-ethereum) are affected by this, they lock account…

On Settlement Finality

Special thanks to Tim Swanson for reviewing, and for further discussions on the arguments in his original paper on settlement finality. Recently one of the major disputes in ongoing debate between public blockchain and permissioned blockchain proponen…

C++ DEV Update: Announcing Remix

After almost three months into the “reboot” of the C++ team, I would like to give an update about the team itself, what we did and what we plan to do. Team update The so-called C++ team currently consists of Paweł Bylica (@chfast), Greg Colvin (@gcol…

Solidity Available in Visual Studio

Consensys and Microsoft have announced that the Ethereum contract programming language Solidity will be available in Microsoft’s Visual Studio integrated development environment. ConsenSys and Microsoft collaborated on this integration to enable develo…

An Open Source Mining Pool Bounty and DEVgrant

Ethereum’s present reliance on Proof of Work (PoW) mining is not ideal, and while we continue to work with gusto towards a Proof of Stake solution (PoS), we have to live with PoW as gracefully as possible (at least until the eventual switch!). Meanwhil…

Serenity PoC2

After an additional two months of work after the release of the first python proof of concept release of Serenity, I am pleased to announce that Serenity PoC2 is now available. Although the release continues to be far from a testnet-ready client, much …

Homestead Release

Update: We’ve released version 1.3.5 including networking hotfix for homestead 1.3.4.  Development of Ethereum started in December 2013 when two developers and a college dropout researcher decided to put their heads together and develop this amazing p…

From Smart Contracts to Courts with not so Smart Judges

Ethereum is often described as a platform for self-enforcing smart contracts. While this is certainly true, this article argues that, especially when more complex systems are involved, it is rather a court with smart lawyers and a judge that is not so …

BTC Relay included in Ethereum Bounty Program

Following hacking @ DEVCON1,  Martin Swende is Nr. 1 on the leaderboard of the Ethereum Bounty Program. The bounty program is ongoing and the last bounty awarded amounted to 5 BTC. The program is open to anyone. With BTC Relay getting ready for launch …

BTC Relay included in Ethereum Bounty Program

Following hacking @ DEVCON1,  Martin Swende is Nr. 1 on the leaderboard of the Ethereum Bounty Program. The bounty program is ongoing and the last bounty awarded amounted to 5 BTC. The program is open to anyone. With BTC Relay getting ready for launch …