Parity

From CryptoWiki

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

  • 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."

"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

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

Other tech by Parity:

"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."

Usage

Parity Ethereum becoming a DAO

"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."

"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."

"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.

Investors

Has worked / partnered with:

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