Ethereum Foundation Internal Update | Ethereum Foundation Blog

Now that Ethereum has launched and is rapidly approaching the Homestead stage, over the past few months we at the Ethereum Foundation have finally had the opportunity to have some breathing room and plan our strategies with a long-term vision. From a development perspective, we have now begun in earnest development to Serenity, the next big overhaul of the Ethereum protocol will include robust code abstraction features, a Casper consensus algorithm, and hopefully some basic scaffolding that will allow scalability features to be developed over time with minimal disruption. POC1 has been released, and POC2 will likely be released in about a month. In parallel, Martin Becze is actively exploring options for improving EVM using WebAssembly, and several groups are working on implementing different forms of advanced coding on top of EVM today.

While this work is exciting, there is also a great deal of equally important, even if somewhat less glamorous, work that needs to be done on the backend of the backend, in the Ethereum Foundation itself, in order to ensure that The organization can ideally survive and thrive long enough to implement the full scope of the Ethereum vision.

At a time The last major update of this kindThe primary challenges faced by the organization were organizational and financial. Expenditures were very high, peaking at over €400,000 per month, spent on a range of development, communications, administration and security audits. The ecosystem has been rapidly booming, with a number of Ethereum-based companies revealing themselves after months of quiet development or newly entering the scene – a saving grace for the organization, as they no longer need to shepherd the development of each layer of the ecosystem itself but it is nonetheless a transitional process that needs To its management, to ensure the continued involvement of all relevant stakeholders in the development process. Administrative inefficiency, involving a total of six entities in four jurisdictions, exacerbated our problems, and at times it seemed as if there was too much to deal with.

At this point, under the leadership of our new CEO Ming Chan, we have begun the process of streamlining our operations on multiple fronts, to prepare the organization for its long-term future.

On the non-administrative front, perhaps most notable is our efforts to increase transparency in the R&D process, and key initiatives on that front are an increased focus on the use of… Our talkative channels For discussion instead of Skype as well EIP process For protocol upgrades; Both of them have been very successful as a major portion of discussions have taken place on those channels and many fruitful investment plans have been made and discussed. We also actively research the state of our other forms of internal and external communications and media, including forums, documentation, and tutorials, and actively welcome community feedback regarding how best to improve them.

However, the biggest challenge of all was the financial one. Open source projects are often known to be underfunded at times With very unfortunate resultsAlthough the unique nature of public crypto-economic blockchains has and may continue to provide opportunities that are simply not available in most other circumstances, the problem remains, and we decided that before we felt comfortable looking for ways to get more money, We must first aim to be more efficient with the money we already have. Hence, the biggest gains were achieved in the past four months, with very positive results.

On the development side, we made the decision to take a more focused approach and target primarily the Ethereum core software and specifically the Go client. This still includes much of the original Ethereum development plan, including light clients (which are well underway), mobile wallet and Mist, and we continue to support C++ and Python to a smaller extent with a particular focus on development tools (Solidity and Mix), but the other parts of the ecosystem that we leave to the wider community; As great as the idea behind Whisper is, it doesn’t currently have any support from the foundation – although we’re actively looking for partnerships and other mechanisms that will help develop some of these add-ons. Our communications have been greatly streamlined, and now consist of a smaller team of individuals who work part-time but are more widely distributed around the world.

Some of the biggest gains lie in administrative costs. Over the past four months, we have begun the process of consolidating the legal entities through which the Foundation funds Ethereum development; Of the six entities we had across Europe until 2015, three are now essentially decommissioned and will soon begin the process of closing them down. We have also moved out of the house we rented when we were expecting to have too many full-time developers in Zug, and are now staying in a smaller location downtown which will save us an employee’s salary on monthly rent and utilities; We have also closed our physical office in London and are actively exploring options to reduce rental costs in Berlin. With Ming spending most of his time in Switzerland, we now have to rely much less on outside contractors for our needs there, allowing us to save more.

Someone else’s electricity bill now…

Overall, the organization’s monthly expenses have now been cut by more than half from their 2015 peak of over €400,000 per month, and currently stand at a monthly amount of around €175,000 (about US$188,000). This roughly consists of:

• €22,000 per month for C++ development (down ~75%)
• €65,000 per month for Go development (down ~10%)
• €5,000 per month for Python development (down ~50%)
• €13,000 per month for IT, hosting, build server maintenance, release coordination, etc. (~35% reduction with more reductions likely soon)
• €6,000 per month for communications (down approximately 85%)
• €20,000 per month for research (almost unchanged)
• €40,000 per month for high-level administrative and executive staff, accounting, office administration, legal and other expenses (reduced by approximately 50% with further reductions likely soon)

The Foundation’s current assets include approximately 2,250,000 ETH, 500 BTC, and $100,000 USD in fiat currencies, giving us approximately one year of runway from this point assuming the Ether price and our budget preferences remain unchanged. Some salaries are paid in ether. Alongside this, we now also have an ongoing agreement with Bitcoin Suisse to convert enterprise ether into fiat at a rate of CHF 5,000 per day in order to secure ongoing liquidity (along with ~$650,000 worth of private sales to individuals and businesses). These numbers reflect the institution’s actual holdings; Almost all of the ether from Genesis Premine and its developer purchase program has now been distributed to its rightful owners.

Over the next few months we expect continued improvements and cost savings, and as our overheads decline, we will once again begin to ramp up our efforts on several fronts. We will soon be adding Lisa Cheng to our part-time communications team, and we will also carefully begin to increase our spending on research efforts in order to accelerate Serenity’s development. At the same time, we are actively exploring different types of strategies in order to increase the runway of the enterprise. Given the very high level of interest in Ethereum that we have seen in North America, Europe and especially Asia, we are confident that we will be able to discover an approach that will ensure continued development not only after Serenity, but also into the future. Ethereum 2.0 and beyond are widely scalable.