Parity

Basics

• "A core blockchain infrastructure company. We're creating an open source creative commons that will enable people to create better institutions through technology."

Audits & Exploits

Bugs/Exploits

• Parity wallet 2017 hacker moved 990 ETH to Tornado Cash. 7 years later laundered another $9M in ETH to cryptocurrency exchange eXch.
• From this blog (22-4-2020):

"Regarding the treasuries to which the [[[ICO]]] Ether was flowing in 2017, one can not help but mention how popular Parity wallets were as a means for storing funds. However, in 2017, early undetected vulnerabilities in these wallets were exploited twice. The first vulnerability in July 2017 led to the theft of 82,189 ETH from Aeternity, 44,055 ETH from Arcade City and 26,793 ETH from Edgeless. The second vulnerability led to the freezing of Ether at 587 addresses, including Polkadot, Iconomi and Musiconomi. Because of this, Polkadot still hasn’t touched any of its treasury, since it was frozen before use."

• From CoinDesk (27-8-2020):

"A “critical bug” has left 13% of Ethereum nodes useless, highlighting what is a growing chink in the network’s armor: client centralization. First hinted at in May and June on GitHub, minority clients Parity-Ethereum and OpenEthereum versions 2.7 and later contain an unknown critical bug that stops nodes from syncing with the network’s latest block.

It was an open secret among Ethereum developers that the Parity-Ethereum client was not up to spec. Indeed, OpenEthereum project manager Marcelo Ruiz de Olano told CoinDesk in a private message that his team found both unresolvable and “very severe issues affecting memory and disk usage.”

In the meantime, the OpenEthereum team has urged node operators to turn back the clock to 2019’s version 2.5 to bring nodes back online. De Olano said he has four engineers on the project alone and hopes to have a workable client by mid-September. Still, client diversification will remain an issue without additional support, he said."

Main projects

• Polkadot; platform for connecting independent blockchains together
• Parity Substrate; a framework for building blockchains and spawning decentralised innovation

Parity developers connected (22-10-2019) a Substrate-based parachain to Polkadot.

• New PoW blockchain built (20-9-2019) on Substrate, called Kulupu.

Other tech by Parity:

• Has Parity Bitcoin for BTC and BCH clients.
• Third party Ethereum implementation (CLI)
• Former Ethereum client. "The Parity Ethereum codebase and maintenance will be (16-12-2019) transitioned to a DAO ownership and maintainer model."
• Rust client by ethcore
• ruby-ethereum - Ruby client
• Non-official client implementing the yellow paper specification
• ethereumjs-vm - Ethereum Virtual Machine in Javascript
• Has an ETC client.
• Parity Fether; fast and light Ethereum wallet
• Parity Signer; a secure offline wallet for you mobile device
• Parity Secret store; enables encrypted smart contracts and permissioning on public blockchains
• Parity Bridge; sidechain tech which speeds up and scales up Dapps by bridging chains together.

"a solution for connecting fast and cheap Proof of Authority (PoA) chains with the Ethereum public network and any other Ethereum-like Proof-of-Work chain. This way, developers can start testing this short-term scaling solution to reduce the cost of running ÐApps on blockchains.

The first phase of Parity Bridge uses the Ropsten testnet to act as the main network, or “Home” bridge, until community developers have tested it enough to ensure a secure and efficient link between two EVM-based chains."

• Parity Wasm; WebAssembly tech stack for cross-platform decentralisation
• Kovan; fast and free Proof-of-Authority testnet for testing Dapps and Smart Contract

Usage

• Kraken, Infura, Coinbase, MyCrypto, Etherscan, WFP, Microsoft, Google
• Other non-official clients implementing the yellow paper are: ethereumj - Java client by the ether.camp team

Parity Ethereum becoming a DAO

• From their own blog (16-12-2019):

"The Parity Ethereum codebase and maintenance will be transitioned to a DAO ownership and maintainer model.

As Parity's outlook changed, so have the practicalities. Supporting a large, highly complex and now quite old codebase on a mainnet as well-used and with such decentralized decision-making as Ethereum is a very much non-trivial task, even for experts. We spend an unfortunately large amount of time on relatively mundane maintenance work that could be better done by others in the community if only we had the correct structure set up. Indeed, Parity is increasingly unable to dedicate the level of resources required for even simple maintenance of this project. As we move to a multi-chain future based on technology that is far more modular, maintainable and interoperable, we find it increasingly difficult to explain to our stakeholders why it makes sense to dedicate our expertise to maintaining legacy technology."

• From Token Tuesdays (25-12-2019):

"While it wasn’t explicitly stated in the announcement post, this transition largely has to do with Parity’s dedication towards the Ethereum competitor, Polkadot. With that in mind, it made little sense for Parity to continue allocating its resources towards maintaining the Ethereum codebase. 

With this transition, Parity plans to transfer the development license to the DAO and move the codebase to its own GitHub organization. Memberships and voting power in the DAO will leverage a stake-weighted token system. By leveraging a DAO-based infrastructure, it creates a fair and transparent mechanism for continuing to develop on the Parity’s Ethereum codebase."

• From Daily Gwei (8-7-2020):

"The Ethereum network is now being dominated by just 1 client - Geth (77%). This is the client that the Ethereum Foundation maintains and is arguably the most battle-hardened one that we have today. It wasn’t always this way though - traditionally, Geth and Parity Ethereum shared a mostly even split of the network but a few months ago Parity announced that they were transitioning their clients ownership and maintenance to a DAO called OpenEthereum. This caused many people to shut down their Parity Ethereum nodes over the last few months which led to Geth growing to account for 77% of the network. Since then, Gnosis has taken the lead on developing OpenEthereum and has hired people to continue working on it internally."

Team, investors, partners, etc.

• Has 62 team members (11-2018) and office locations in London, Cambridge and Berlin. Update (10-2019) has now over 100 members.
• Wood, Gavin; founder, At Parity, Gavin currently leads innovation on Substrate and Polkadot.
• Jutta Steiner; founder & CEO parity technologies
• Fredrik Harrysson; CTO
• Afri Schoedon, release manager (and sometimes named CEO) for the Parity ethereum client, and an Ethereum developer (self-proclaimed “blockchain minimalist” and “crypto-anarchist”)
• Björn Wagner; Founder & Chief Commercial Officer
• Joshua Mir, Parity Tech
• Kirill Pimenov, Parity Tech
• Maciej Hirsz, Parity Tech
• Raul Romanutti
• Robert Habermeier; Co-Founder, Polkadot
• 'Alexandra'
• Fabian Gompf; VP
• Eric Wang; Ecosystem Development Lead 
• Anton Kaliaev; previously in the Cosmos ecosystem since 2017

Investors

• Received a $5m grant from the Ethereum Foundation for their years of contribution to the Ethereum ecosystem and to complete the following work: eWasm compatibility, shipping a light wallet for mainnet, and completing their work on sharding Phase 0 and 1. Update: "We have delivered on about three-quarters of the proposal"

Has worked / partnered with:

• Protocol Labs
• Melonport
• UN World Food Programme
• Energy Web Foundation

• Is partnering with the non-profit Zcash Foundation to create the first Zcash node software that isn't built or managed by the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company; the company will have two engineers devoted to building this new Zcash node and hiring four more. Update: Zebra has been launched. It is entirely written in Rust. 
• Is part of the "Support & Recognition" and an advisor for Ambrosus (7-2-2020)