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Ethereum has grown very rapidly in the last few months. Transaction volume on the blockchain has <\/span>more than doubled<\/span><\/a>, surpassing 10 transactions per second for days at a time. The number of new accounts created per day <\/span>passed 100,000<\/span><\/a>, and the <\/span>number of nodes<\/span><\/a> has increased despite rising system requirements. As attention and interest in the blockchain space as a whole continues to hit new highs, we are entering a new phase in the industry\u2019s growth: the phase where we are finally going from experiments and tests to real, live applications.<\/span><\/p>\n Casper<\/strong><\/p>\n Sharding<\/strong><\/p>\n Py-EVM<\/strong><\/p>\n EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals)<\/strong><\/p>\n We merged 12 EIPs since the last roundup.<\/p>\n Formal Verification<\/strong><\/p>\n Testing<\/strong><\/p>\n Remix<\/strong><\/p>\n Latest update (remix.ethereum.org) includes:<\/span><\/p>\n Thanks to @ninabreznik (Solidity Editor), @serapath (Recorder), @ryestew (Interface) for their active contributions.<\/span><\/p>\n We are now focusing on improving the code editor, improving Remixd (which is now hardly usable for huge folders) and polishing the themes.<\/span><\/p>\n We continue to work try our best to update remix.ethereum.org each month and for each important bug fix. As Remix is under heavy development, there are always new features coming in, so feel free to contribute feedback and code.<\/span><\/p>\n Solidity<\/strong><\/p>\n We are working on an <\/span>optimizer<\/span><\/a> for our new intermediate language IULIA. The first goal is to turn the extremely modular code of the new ABI coder into efficient code. Of course all inline assembly and also the main code generator will benefit from this work in the end. In contrast to the old optimizer, which basically soaked in bytecode into an internal representation and then re-generated the code from scratch, the new optimizer is composed of <\/span>many<\/span><\/a> small<\/span><\/a> and<\/span><\/a> very<\/span><\/a> simple<\/span><\/a> individual<\/span><\/a> stages that directly operate on the IULIA AST and thus are easily verifiable for correctness.<\/span><\/p>\n The second large area of work is the SMT checker component. It is now able to correctly follow branching and joining control flow and also takes <\/span>conditions<\/span><\/a> into account. Experimental loop <\/span>unrolling<\/span><\/a> is the next stage.<\/span><\/p>\n Apart from that, we are making many <\/span>tiny<\/span><\/a> changes<\/span><\/a> to the <\/span>compiler<\/span><\/a> and language and fixing the <\/span>remaining<\/span><\/a> issues that were identified in the recently completed compiler audit.<\/span><\/p>\n I would like to thank the many voluntary external contributors for their hard work (individual attributions are made on the release page, as always)!<\/span><\/p>\n Security<\/strong><\/p>\n We are continuing the efforts to fuzz-test the EVM, and we are also applying fuzz testing to other areas of the Ethereum platform such as the geth networking stack and the solidity pipeline where we are seeing if it can be used for quality assurance of some new IULIA components.<\/span><\/p>\n We are creating a new signer to enable more advanced use cases where account management is decoupled from the network node. The idea is to have a what-you-see-is-what-you-sign experience, where the sensitive components can be executed in a separate VM, or on a separate computer or a mobile phone.<\/span><\/p>\n There has been quite a lot of activity on the bounty-front, particularly targeting Mist, and we\u2019d like to remind all usersurge you not to use the Mist browser on untrusted networks or untrusted websites.<\/span><\/p>\n Also, EthereumJ is finally being added to the group of clients which undergo Hive-testing, and EthereumJS is being added to the group of clients supporting the common shared json output so that it can play along with the others in the Evmlab tools.<\/span><\/p>\n Python Ecosystem<\/strong><\/p>\n We have completed migrating the repositories for most of the python libraries to the Ethereum Foundation github. Many of these libraries were renamed in the process to conform to a single naming convention. If you use any of the following libraries, you should update your dependencies.<\/span><\/p>\n In addition, most of the python tooling will now issue deprecation warnings when run using python 2. Support for python 2 will be removed in the first quarter of 2018. Please upgrade to python 3 if you haven\u2019t already.<\/span><\/p>\n Ethereum-Tester<\/strong><\/p>\n The <\/span>eth-tester<\/span> python library has gotten a few upgrades and improvements. This library is still in a pre-release beta.<\/span><\/p>\n Web3.py<\/strong><\/p>\n Web3.py lets your python code interact with an Ethereum node. Version 4 was released, as Beta, including these changes:<\/span><\/p>\n EthereumJS ecosystem<\/strong><\/p>\n Web3.js 1.0<\/strong><\/p>\n The <\/span>1.0 branch<\/span><\/a> is evolving with the help of a lot of community contributions. Even though it is still in beta, many developers already use 1.0 for their projects and the response so far has been overwhelmingly positive. In the next weeks, the <\/span>web3-accounts<\/span><\/a> package will be audited as it can be used for generating keys and signing messages and transactions.<\/span><\/p>\n\n
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