Update: we have released version 1.3.5 including the network patch for Homestead 1.3.4.
The development of Ethereum began in December 2013 when two developers and a college dropout researcher decided to come together and develop this amazing piece of technology. we went later United by many like-minded people. Our first proof of concept (PoC) came on February 1, 2014. By the time we started our crowdsale on July 23, we were at PoC 5 with a protocol that was almost complete and had achieved cross-client compatibility. The team was excited when we got our first million and our second and our third and so on. It was crazy! Believing that we could deliver the Ethereum platform was one thing, but seeing others believe and want to participate was incredibly inspiring.
A bit later, in October 2014, Gav and I were sitting on the train to the Zurich airport when we thought an Ethereum conference would be absolutely amazing and decided to do it in November of that same year. It was a bit hectic for the organizers (thanks Aeron, Christian and Jason!), but we made it through because we were determined to host our first internal developer conference, DEVwith0.
By the time January 2015 rolled around, we all knew that would be the year we would have to launch our Ethereum beta. Our PoC series closed with the PoC 9 hackathon on March 5, and on July 30, 2015 we successfully launched Frontier. Miners from all over the world started their mining rigs, users started their nodes, and the network came to life. It worked; smoothly, smoothly, and from a developer perspective, the launch couldn’t have gone better. In the months that followed, our team and our community demonstrated their potential and true genius in addressing network issues and together they resolved two consensus bugs.
We felt it was extremely important to clearly communicate to our users how we felt about network security. Today, we are incredibly proud to announce that we are finally ready to remove the crossed out word “secure” from our website and move into a new phase: Homestead. The Homestead block will be 1,150,000 for the main grid, which means the Homestead transition will be around noon on Pi day and the Homestead block for the Morden grid will be 494,000.
What is Homestead?
Homestead is the second major release of the Ethereum platform, which includes several protocol changes and a network change that gives us the ability to do more network upgrades:
- EIP-2 Main Farm Fork Changes
- EIP-7 Hardfork EVM Update: DELEGATECALL
- EIP-8 devp2p forward compatibility
customer launches
He Go version of Ethereum (geth) for Homestead will be version 1.3.4 version 1.3.5 and includes the aforementioned changes to the protocol and network. Following the release of Homestead, the Go team will also be coming shortly with the version 1.4, which is our big feature release and includes months of work. The reason Homestead and our feature release are kept separate is to keep Homestead release changes to an absolute minimum, making it easier to debug when needed.
He C++ the version of Ethereum (eth) for Homestead will be version 1.2.0. In addition to protocol and network changes, it also tries to be as compatible with geth as possible. You can now use mist and geth added with an eth node running in the background. In the coming weeks, we will align key management with geth. The new EVM DELEGATECALL feature will be usable in Solidity for library calls (not released yet). For more details, see the release notes.
Whats Next
Over the next two weeks, the teams will come together to pave the way for future development of both the Ethereum protocol and a roadmap for clients and sub-protocols like Swarm and Whisper. Once we have a clear picture of the work ahead, we’ll provide details in another blog post.
To learn more about Ethereum, Homestead, and how to operate one of the Ethereum clients, head over to the Property documentation project and let’s prepare together for the next phase of Ethereum.
