Ethereum holds a top position among the promising blockchain platforms being investigated by R3, the financial innovation consortium that includes more than 50 of the world’s leading banks. Recently R3 commissioned Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin to write a report on Ethereum design, upcoming technical developments and applications in private systems. Buterin’s report, titled “ Ethereum: Platform Review – Opportunities and Challenges for Private and Consortium Blockchains ,” is online on R3’s website.
Buterin’s 44-page report gives a detailed overview of Ethereum’s overall architecture and technical design, current status and development roadmap. Ethereum 2.0 is expected in late 2017 and Ethereum 3.0 in late 2018. These labels don’t have much information attached, but indicate that the developers are pushing ahead at full speed. The report has a special focus on financial applications. In particular, the report provides useful directions to financial firms intending to build private blockchains with Ethereum technology.
R3 Senior Strategy Associate Kathleen Breitman and CTO Richard Gendal Brown wrote an executive summary of Buterin’s report. “In R3’s assessment of cryptographic currencies and ledgers, we evaluate each solution in terms of technical scalability, privacy and the ability to introduce automation into business processes through smart contracts,” notes the executive summary. “There are many attractive features of the [Ethereum] platform: Ethereum natively supports Turing-complete smart contracts and the scripting language is user-friendly.”
The first part of the executive summary, written by Breitman, summarizes the main points of Buterin’s text from R3’s perspective. Breitman notes that scalability is a key outstanding question for distributed ledger solutions in capital markets, and blockchain technologies are still very much behind, by orders of magnitude, the transaction throughput of mainstream financial networks. Ethereum developers are exploring two solutions to enhance the network’s throughput: sharding and state channels.
In current Ethereum (and Bitcoin) networks, all transactions are replicated by […]
