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In early October 2018, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of “Ethereum”, the largest technology community of blockchain, suddenly said on Twitter,
”
Ethereum will ‘absolutely survive’ without me
“And said he was fading into the second tier. This caused quite a stir in the blockchain community. Many people worry that if God V really wants to leave, will Ethereum still be able to maintain its leading position in the blockchain industry?
In fact,
As the most mature underlying architecture platform of blockchain, Ethereum has long been not just one man show of God V, but a prosperous open source community supported by many developers.
At Devcon 4, the annual conference for Ethereum developers in Prague, a number of core developers presented their latest research findings.
Figure | Vitalik Buterin (source: Wikipedia)
Figure | Vitalik Buterin tweets (source: Twitter)
Far more than other cryptocurrencies! Ethereum is the most actively developed blockchain
Ethereum is undoubtedly the most actively developed blockchain in terms of active code submissions.
The number of submissions on GitHub, the number of asterisks and forks in the repository, and the number of developers far outnumber bitcoin, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, EOS, and all other cryptocurrencies like Litecoin.
Ethereum is an open-source blockchain underlying system that’s kind of like a blockchain version of Android,
Providing apis and interfaces on which anyone can rapidly develop various decentralized applications (DApps)
. Although the speed and efficiency of blockchain is not as good as the traditional Internet at present, according to the statistics of the Chain Tower think tank, as of September 30, 2018, there have been 940 DApps included in the Ethereum platform, of which 352 are game DApps, accounting for 37.5%. Competition Dapps accounted for 20 percent, trading markets 5 percent and other categories 37.5 percent.
Figure | “in September 2018 the etheric fang DApp data analysis report (source: chain tower think-tank
A three-tier developer community from the outside in supports Ethereum activity
In short, the Ethereum development community can be roughly divided from the outside in, from the upper application projects to the underlying architecture
Three layers of developers
.
The outermost layer is built on top of the Ethereum underlying architecture of various upper application project development
.
These developers may not be directly involved in the technical advancement of the underlying architecture, but they still contribute to the prosperity of the entire community ecology. From the popular Cryptokitties, to the “capital plate” game Fomo 3D, which once attracted hundreds of millions of dollars a day, are all DApps built on Ethereum.
The second layer consists of peripheral developers from outside the foundation who are also invested in the underlying architecture.
Because Ethereum is a fully open source ecosystem, developers around the world can participate in various forms of underlying development if they are interested. Ethereum’s off-chain scale-out solution, Raiden Network, is an example.
At its core is The Ethereum Foundation, headed by its founder, V,
Headquartered in Singapore, the company now has a research team of more than 30 people scattered around the world, dedicated to the research and development of the underlying core architecture. Many of them are developers born after 1990, just like V.
When asked if he would take a back seat in the future, he not only said, “It’s already happening,” but also said, “Most of the research is now being done by Danny Ryan, Justin Drake, Hsiao-Wei Wang and others.”
For example, Justin Drake, 29, is one of the main leaders of the sharding technology in Ethereum. He built the first Bitcoin ATM on campus at Cambridge University in the UK.
Justin Drake also unveiled a preliminary design for the next generation Ethereum ASIC at Devcon 4.
In order to solve the problem of cryptocurrencies having to rely on proof-of-work (PoW), or mining, which causes a lot of energy consumption, the Ethereum community has been actively studying how to move to proof-of-interest (PoS) in recent years.
Sharding technology is the key technology for Ethereum to switch from PoW to PoS mechanism.
One difficulty of PoS mechanism is how to generate good random numbers to ensure that the attacker cannot effectively attempt many random numbers simultaneously to achieve the target of attack.
This will depend on cryptography such as verifiable delay functions (VDF), led by Justin Drake, and on hardware such as special ASics (dedicated chips).
In the past, the ASIC mining machine discussed in the currency circle was mainly for the calculation of PoW, with the purpose of quickly calculating PoW and grabbing the advantage of block generation.
And now in Ethereum talk of ASIC is specialized in computing VDF.
Justin Drake’s goal was to design an ASIC that would make it impossible for an attacker to solve random numbers simply by outperforming them and using a lot of computational power.
In other words, the possibility of the entire network being breached can be reduced to a level where there is almost no need to worry about it.
Another focus for Ethereum, Casper, is led by Danny Ryan.
Casper is the key to Ethereum’s transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-equity (PoS) mechanism, and is expected to solve the inherent shortcomings of PoS mechanism such as node joint evil, in order to smoothly replace PoW mechanism.
In addition to being the key to Ethereum’s future, Danny Ryan is known within the foundation for his communication skills. Internal developers tell DT that Danny Ryan is always able to bring together several research and development teams to communicate with each other during the weekly Ethereum meeting held every Thursday. There are times when a difficult question is thrown at a meeting and no one knows how to answer it, but Danny Ryan can react quickly and then define and clarify.
Figure | the etheric fang magician association (Council of Ethereum Magicians) website and Ethereum making page, you can find the associated etheric fang conference contents of text, voice recording the progress report, etc. We can clearly see the ongoing development of the various teams, as well as the latest research on Ethereum currently available (sources: Council of Ethereum Magicians, ethereum GitHub)
There are more than 14,000 nodes in the world, with China accounting for 13% of the total
Ethereum currently has more than 14,000 nodes around the world. Most of these nodes are in the United States and Europe, with American nodes alone accounting for 43 percent.
Asia is dominated by China, accounting for 13% of the world’s nodes.
In fact, the Chinese Ethereum community has been growing since a very early age, with many of the early core Ethereum developers coming from China. However, in the past period of time, under the outbreak of blockchain entrepreneurship, the early members of the mainland Ethereum flowed into a large number of other projects,
On the contrary, the core development community ecology of Ethereum in Taiwan and Hong Kong continues to see more and more vigorous.
Figure | the etheric fang global node distribution (source
: “ethernodes”)
The Taipei Ethereum community, initiated by the post-90s generation, has become an important driver of blockchain development energy
Take Taiwan as an example, the Taipei Ethereum community established more than two years ago, including God V himself, as well as Litecoin founder Charlie Lee and many other blockchain industry celebrities, have personally participated in. In addition,
Currently, the Ethereum Foundation has a global team of about 30 developers, and four or five of them are from Taiwan.
How did such a thriving developer community develop?
DT Jun also interviewed the Taipei Ethereum Meetup co-founder Liang Zhicheng, who was born in 1990.
In 2015, Leong was introduced to Ethereum by a friend. Having only known bitcoin, he looked at the Ethereum white paper and saw that it was completely different. “Like trying to make a computer, Ethereum has a lot of applications, software and services,” he said. So “we started organizing parties, and then in April 2016 officially held Taipei’s first developer Ethereum event.”
For more than two years,
With regular offline activities and online fan groups, the Taipei Ethereum community has successfully promoted a vibrant local blockchain developer culture.
There was even an “Ethereum All-Star Tech Talk Ethereum All-Star Tech Panel” in March this year, which brought together almost All of Ethereum’s core and key players in Taipei.
“Taiwan has always had a good community culture,” observes Leong Zhicheng.
Taipei alone has a number of very large communities, including various open source communities, and even more ancient basic communities.
This culture of tech talent actively participating in community communication has directly contributed to the rise of Ethereum in Taiwan. Just like Leong Zhicheng, also because of his participation in the Taipei Ethereum community activities, he has joined the Ethereum Foundation as a researcher.
So how, specifically, do you get involved in the Ethereum development community?
The development work of Taifang can be simply divided into 4 processes, which are in the following order
Research theory
,
Written to specification
,
Prototype of implementation
.
To the implementation client
. Liang Zhicheng explained that in fact, the production of software programs is of course not so simple, and the actual operation is a little more complicated.
However, the sequence is still consistent with research, specification, and then development and implementation.
At the same time, the Ethereum Foundation holds weekly meetings every two weeks to discuss all things Ethereum. This week it will be open to the world through the Ethereum Wizard Fraternity website, where everyone can participate together, in full display of the open source spirit. “Sometimes some mysterious people show up,” laughs Leong.
“There are many ways to get started. The first way is to read and understand the code, and then post on the forum to say hello, ask questions and interact with other developers,” says Leong, adding that newcomers can start by helping to translate documents and then start to contribute when they are more familiar with the situation. In addition, the Ethereum Foundation team has created a Lazy pack that gives newbies a quick look at current development requirements.
In addition to welcoming voluntary contributions from outside developers, the Ethereum Foundation also offers rewards for calling on more programmers to solve difficult problems.
So far in 2018, a total of $11 million has been awarded to 52 projects.
The scalability and security project of Ethereum has received the most funding.
In terms of value, 61.3% of the prize money was invested in scalability projects and 16.8% in security projects. In terms of the number of projects, 29.1% are scalability projects and 18.8% are security projects.
Figure | bonuses analysis on the development of Ethernet fang (source: Liang Zhicheng)
The development award application process is divided into several steps. The first step is to submit a project application. Leong suggested that applicants must demonstrate a specific commitment to the Ethereum ecosystem, development capabilities, development focus and schedule. At the same time, you have to show what differentiates you from other projects. Of course, the project must support open source.
Next, the proposed project will be reviewed in writing and in person by the Ethereum core team and the consultant team in order to gradually clarify the project objectives, development path and bonus amount, and guide the proposal to the overall development direction of Ethereum.
Figure | the etheric fang development award application process (source: Liang Zhicheng)
“Vitalik wants everyone to have the ability to participate in the operation, development and research of Ethereum,” Leong said. “He’s gradually stopped meddling in everything, or giving opinions on everything.”
That’s because while Vitalik’s research and development skills are unmatched, he knows that the Ethereum breakthrough can’t be achieved by him alone. Fostering the development capacity of the entire community is essential to the prosperity of Ethereum, and indeed the blockchain industry as a whole.
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