Now that Ethereum has launched and quickly approaches its family property phase, in recent months, we have finally had the chance to have a certain breathing room and plan our strategies with a longer -term vision. From a development point of view, we have now seriously started the development of SerenityThe next great overhaul of the Ethereum protocol which will include powerful software abstraction features, the Casper consensus algorithm and, hopefully, some basic scaffolding which will allow the development of evolutionary characteristics over time with a minimum of disturbance. POC1 has been published and POC2 will probably be published in about a month. At the same time, Martin Becze actively explores options to optimize the EVM using Weba Vomena, and several groups are working on the implementation of various forms of advanced cryptography in addition to the EVM today.
As exciting as this work is, however, there is also a substantial quantity of work just as important, even if they are a little less glamorous, which must be carried out on the backend of the backend, in the Ethereum foundation itself, in order to ensure that the organization can survive and ideally prosper long enough to implement all the extent of Ethereum.
At the time of Last major update of this kindThe main challenges of the Foundation were organizational and financial. The expenses were very high, culminating in more than 400,000 EUR per month spent for a combination of development, communications, administration and security audits. The ecosystem flourished quickly, with a certain number of companies based on Ethereum managing after months of silent development or entered the scene – a saving grace for the Foundation, because it no longer needed to sponsor the development of each layer of the ecosystem itself, but nevertheless a transition which should be managed, so as to ensure that all the relevant actors continue to be included in the development process. Administrative ineffections, including a total of six entities in four jurisdictions, aggravated our problems and, sometimes, it seemed that there was too much to manage.
It is at this stage that we, under the direction of our new executive director Ming Chan, began a process of rationalizing our operations on several fronts, in order to prepare the Foundation in its future in the longer term.
End of an era, end of a set of challenges, beginning of a new era, beginning of another set …
On the non-administrative front, the main highlight may have been our efforts in terms of increased transparency in the research and development process, the main initiatives on this front being the emphasis on use Our gitter channels for the discussion rather than Skype, as well as the EIP process for upgrades to the protocol; The two were very successful with a large part of the discussions taking place on these channels and many EIPs are manufactured and discussed. We also actively examine the state of our other forms of communication and internal and external media, including forums, documentation and tutorials, and we actively welcome community comments concerning the best way to improve them.
The biggest challenge of all, however, was clearly financial. Open source projects are often known to be sub-financially, sometimes with very unhappy resultsAnd although the unique nature of public cryptocurical blockchains has and can continue to offer opportunities that are simply not available in most other circumstances, the problem remains, and we have decided that before being comfortable looking for more money, we should first aim to be more effective with the money we already have. Therefore, it is here that the most important gains in the past four months have been achieved and with very positive results.
On the development side, we have made the decision to adopt a more targeted approach and mainly target the basic Ethereum software and in particular the Go Customer. This always includes a large part of the Development Plan of Ethereum Original, including light customers (which are well advanced), a mobile portfolio and a mist, and we continue to support C ++ and Python to a smaller measure by putting the development tools (solidity and mix), but other aspects of the ecosystem that we leave to the wider community; As brilliant as the idea behind Whisper, it is currently obtaining zero foundation support – although we are actively looking for partnerships and other mechanisms that will help develop some of these additions. Our communications have been greatly rationalized and now consists of a small team of people who are part -time but more broadly distributed worldwide.
Some of the most important gains are in administrative costs. In the past four months, we have started a process of consolidating legal entities through which Ethereum’s development is funded by the Foundation; Of the six entities we had across Europe until 2015, three have now been tilted and will soon start the closing process. We also left the house that we had rented when we expected to have a very large number of developers working full -time in Zug, and we are now based in a smaller location in the center of the city which will save us the value of the salary of a rent and monthly public services; We also closed our physical office in London and actively explore options to reduce rental costs in Berlin. With Ming presents most of the time in Switzerland, we must now count much less on external entrepreneurs for our needs there, which allows us to save even more.
Someone’s electricity bill now …
On the whole, the monthly expenses of the Foundation have now been reduced by more than half compared to our 2015 peak by more than 400,000 EUR per month, and are currently a monthly sum of around 175,000 EUR (~ 188,000 USD). This consists roughly:
- EUR 22,000 per month for C ++ development (down by ~ 75%)
- EUR 65,000 per month for GO development (down by ~ 10%)
- EUR 5,000 per month for the development of Python (down approximately 50%)
- EUR 13,000 per month for this, accommodation, the maintenance of construction servers, liberation coordination, etc. (down approximately 35% with more cuts probably to come soon)
- EUR 6,000 per month for communications (down by ~ 85%)
- EUR 20,000 per month for research (almost unchanged)
- EUR 40,000 per month for high -level administrative and executive staff, accounting, offices management, legal expenses and others (down by ~ 50% with more reductions to come soon)
The current active assets include around 2,250,000 ETH, 500 BTC and $ 100,000 in fiduciary currencies, which gives us about a year of track from this point by assuming that the price of the ether and our budgetary preferences remain unchanged. Some wages are paid for ether; At the same time, we now also have a continuous agreement with Swiss Bitcoin to convert the ether of the Fiat Foundation to the rate of 5,000 CHF per day in order to guarantee current liquidity (as well as around $ 650,000 in private sales to individuals and businesses). These figures reflect real foundation funds; Almost all of the ether of Genesis Premine and the development program for developers has now been distributed to its legitimate owners.
In the coming months, we expect optimizations and cost savings to continue, and as our general costs reduce, we will start again to increase our efforts on several fronts. We soon add Lisa Cheng to our part -time team for communications, and we will also begin to carefully increase our expenses in research efforts in order to accelerate the development of serenity. At the same time, we actively explore various types of strategies in order to increase the foundation track. Given the very high level of interest for Ethereum that we have seen in North America, in Europe and in particular in Asia, we are convinced that we will be able to find an approach which guarantees that development will continue not only serenity, but also for a massively evolutionary Ethereum 2.0.
