Ethereum (ETH) Foundation Refutes Plans to Invest $15M on the Development of Verifiable Delay Functions

The Ethereum Foundation recently denied its plans to invest $15 million to develop VDFs (Verifiable Delay Functions) for use in its migration to a Proof of Stake consensus protocol. Justin Drake – Ethereum Foundation researcher – made the clarification in private correspondence with Cointelegraph on the 8th of February.

According to a report from CoinDesk – a digital currency news outlet – Ethereum Foundation was purportedly considering spending $15 million in the development of the technology, given its prospective benefit form the future transition of Ethereum to a Proof of State network.

However, in an email, Drake told Cointelegraph that: “The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is not looking to invest $15 million. We are looking to split funds 50/50 with Filecoin or other financial partners.”

What are Verifiable Delay Functions?

VDFs, which his short for Verifiable Delay Functions, are a type of technology that basically protects systems that depend on the generation of (pseudo) random values form attacks or manipulation strategies. When it comes to a blockchain that uses a Proof of Stake consensus protocol, functions such as Verifiable Delays Functions can come in very handy.

They can be very important in order to prevent the possibility that the participant of a network may influence or predict randomness in order to manipulate which validators or leader will be elected via the protocol. According to the report, the migration to the Proof of Stake protocol is expected to be completed with the final upgrade of the Ethereum network.

The final upgrade of the network is known as Ethereum 2.0 or Serenity. This upgrade will be the last in the array of four upgrades set out in the roadmap of the blockchain network. At the time of writing, the Ethereum network is in its third stage (Metropolis). This stage comprises of two system-wide hard forks – Constantinople and Byzantium. Both of them are aimed at paving the way for Ethereum 2.0 or Serenity.

The Delay in the Launch of Constantinople

Constantinople was initially scheduled to be launched last year. Unfortunately, the Core Dev team of Ethereum wasn’t able to activate the upgrade last year. They were not able to activate Constantinople last year because they ran into some issues when testing the upgrade. The Dev team later shifted the launch to December, which wasn’t also realistic.

In December, they came to an agreement that the upgrade would go live in January 2019. Unfortunately, January wasn’t still favorable for the upgrade. The team has now pick February for the upgrade, and many are hoping that the upgrade will finally go live this month.

Eventually, through the Proof of Stake consensus algorithm and an array of other technical upgrades, Ethereum 2.0 is expected to tackle basic questions such as mining centralization, security, economic finality, and scalability. At the beginning of this month, the Dev team of Ethereum launched its first pre-release for phase zero of the transition of the network to Serenity, which Vitalik Buterin said was basically feature complete for Casper.

Ethereum (ETH) Price Today – ETH / USD

NamePrice24H %
ethereum
Ethereum(ETH)
$0.00-2.08%

At the time of writing, Ethereum (ETH) is trading at $119 after an increase of about 10 percent over the past twenty-four hours. The current market cap of the digital currency is $12.51 billion and its trading volume over the past twenty-four hours is $3.32 billion.

Princess Ogono is a writer, lawyer and fitness enthusiast. She believes cryptocurrencies are the future. When she's not writing, she spends time with her adorable cat, Ginger and works out often.

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