Well… what a busy two weeks. I thought it was time to do another update for any of you who might be interested in how we’re doing. If you don’t already know, I’m Gavin, founder of Ethereum and one of the three directors (along with Vitalik and Jeffrey) of Ethereum ÐΞV, the development entity that creates Ethereum and all associated technology.
After conducting a recruitment on behalf of DEV in Bucharest with the help of Mihai Alisie and the lovely Roxanna Sureanu, I spent the last week at home (and, coincidentally, Ethereum HQ) in Zug, Switzerland. During this time I was able to get up and running with the first prototype of Whisper, our secure identity-based communications protocol, and ended up with a small IRC-like ÐApp that demonstrated how easy it is to use. For those interested, there is more information on Whisper in the Ethereum Github wiki and a little nice screenshot on my twitter account. In addition to this, I have been helping to finalize the soon to be announced PoC-7 specification and working towards a PoC-8 (final). Finally, during our brief time together in Zug, Jeffrey, Vitalik, and I drafted our strategy around identity and key management; this will be further developed over the next few weeks.
ÐΞVHUB Berlin
In Berlin, Sarah has been super busy with the builders getting the center ready. Here is a Partner Photos of the work in progress that is the center of Berlin. It may not sound like much yet, but we’re on track to move in mid-November. I’m particularly happy with Sarah’s efforts to find an authentic 1970s barrista espresso machine (-:
I am excited to announce that Christian Vömel will be joining the team in Berlin to be the Office Manager of ÐΞVHUB Berlin. Christian has many years of experience, including having worked in an international environment and has even taught office administration. He’ll be taking over some of the work from Aeron Buchanan, our frankly overworked company secretary.
the team grows
We’ve finalized a number of new hires in recent weeks: Network engineer Lefteris Karapetsas will be joining the Berlin team imminently. Having considerable experience with state-of-the-art network traffic analysis and deep packet inspection systems, he will help audit our network protocols; however (like much of our team) truly multidisciplinary, he will also work on NatSpec. , the code name for our natural language formal contract specification system, a cornerstone of our transaction security model.
I am pleased to announce that Ian Meikle, the accomplished videographer who co-authored the impressive Ethereum “Koyaanis-glitchy” brand video has moved to ÐΞV to help with the communications equipment. He, who will only be known as Texture, also joined Stephan’s communications side to help with US strategy and coordinate the global network of meetups and hackathons. Great to see such a capable and passionate designer on the team; I know he has some great ideas for ÐApps!
Two more hires under Stephan on the communications team include ken kappler, managing the direction of developer education, hackathons, the ethereum curriculum and university associations. George Hallam has also been employed to evangelize Ethereum to startups and partners, boost the reach of our formal network, and generally assist Stephan in letting everyone know what Ethereum is and how he can help them.
Jeff’s team has also recently expanded; he will be telling you about his developments in an upcoming post.
New developments
Aside from the aforementioned progress with Whisper and PoC-7, Christoph has continued his great work with the test repository. Christian has made a lot of progress with the Solidity language, as he recently put the first Solidity compiled program on the testnet blockchain just a few days ago.
Marek has been carefully porting C++ to a fundamentally unified JSON-RPC and Javascript front-end linked to the Go client. Meanwhile, Alex has been dealing with the C++ cryptographic back-end and has done a great job of reducing overhead and weird dependencies.
Of late the communications team have some good news, in particular they are in contact with some world class educational establishments regarding the possibility of an educational partnership and the formation of a network of chapters both in the UK and internationally. Look at this space (-:
Finally, our Polish partners at IMAPP (Paweł and Artur) have completed their first implementation of the JIT-compiled LLVM-based EVM implementation. They are reporting an average of 30x speedup (up to 100x!) for non-external EVM instructions over the basic C++-based EVM implementation, which is already best-in-class. Brilliant job and we look forward to further improvements and optimizations.
And the rest…
So much to come; There are a couple of announcements (including a large number of upcoming hires) that I’d love to make, but they need to be finalized before I can write about them here. Stay tuned for the next update!
It gave ([email protected]).