OpenEthereum
Basics
History
- Used to be a client maintained by Parity, but that company moved away towards its own blockchain development of Polkadot. "The Parity Ethereum codebase and maintenance will be (16-12-2019) transitioned to a DAO ownership and maintainer model."
- 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."
Tech
- From Week In Ethereum (13-9-2020):
"OpenEthereum’s vision for Parity client: focus on Eth mainnet. As such, deprecating IPFS/Swarm as well as Kovan testnet and other non-Ethereum chains, backporting features to the v2.5 codebase."
Upgrades
- From Week in Ethereum (6-6-2021):
"OpenEthereum are sunsetting the legacy Parity codebase and are instead working on Akula (Rust version of Erigon - formerly Turbogeth). OpenEthereum v3 functionality including tracing being added to Erigon."
Roadmap
- Can be found [Insert link here].
Audits
- Bug bounty program can be found here (12-10-2020).
Bugs
"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."
- From Week in Ethereum (19-4-2021):
"OpenEthereum had a bug a few hours into Berlin and thus it went down. Here’s the detailed version of the bug involving access lists and an address reserved for the bls12-381 precompile which is planned but vacant. OpenEthereum v3.2.4 is the latest version with the bugfix."
Team, Funding, Partners
Team
- Marcelo Ruiz de Olano; project manager
Funding
- From Daily Gwei (8-7-2020):
"Gnosis has taken the lead on developing OpenEthereum and has hired people to continue working on it internally."
