Ember Weekly Update #0
Welcome to Ember’s first Weekly Update! This update will concern all work done since the start of the project, not just work from the past week, as it is the first.
The Ember team started out with Luke Parker and Harris Rothaermel, who thought of the name Ember. Unfortunately, while still in the planning stage, Harris lost the time to contribute and stepped down. Currently, it’s just Luke Parker, but Tim Mesker has been reviewing the business side of the project.
After picking a project name, Luke made sure to acquire relevant domain names. He bought embercrypto.io, embercrypto.org, and embercrypto.tech. We plan on using the .io domain as our main site. Additionally, Gabe Rundlett contributed a logo for the project.

Of course, we don’t believe in buying sites and creating media files without developing code. In fact, we believe that’s one of the biggest problems in cryptocurrency right now. So, as we did this, Luke made sure to diligently build up our code base.
He utilized various libraries, including:
- imath (later replaced by GMP)
- SHA512
- Lyra2 (later replaced by Argon2)
- libsecp256k1 (the same Elliptic Curve library BTC uses; it was added thanks to critical aid by Mamy Ratsimbazafy)
Luke, with support from a user known as Quelklef, also coded support for various number bases, such as Base 58.
Luke built the Merit blockchain (called Reputation at the time) and Wallets (Private Keys, Public Keys, and Addresses). After came the Lattice, a form of DAG, formally a Block Lattice (designed by Colin LeMahieu), that stores the actual transactions.
While the Lattice was being developed, Luke published the Merit Caching Whitepaper. Merit Caching is a brand new consensus mechanism developed specifically for Ember, yet released into the public domain. It provides a definitive and fact-based overview of the entire Lattice via a secondary blockchain (the Merit blockchain, to be specific).
The Lattice has multiple types of blocks that can be added, but right now, only the Send/Receive blocks are fully implemented. That said, this means the Lattice supports transactions. The first transaction occurred on August 25th, 2018.
Luke also built networking code to define inter-node communication, accept connections, and handle incoming data. This is enough to get some demos up, but not enough to setup a testnet, yet. That is the next planned milestone.
One of the demos is a stress test which measures how many transactions the node can handle. When running this demo, we were able to log up to 220 TPS on a single core machine. We plan on getting this even higher by adding threaded multiprocessing, and several already noted optimizations, which should allow us to breach the 1000 mark.
It is also important to note that the Lattice relies on the Merit blockchain for consensus, yet they currently do not connect. This has the consequence of the network not being able to maintain consensus, and consensus varying from node to node. This a problem that will be fixed when there are other nodes exist in the first place.
Apart from building a code base, Ember has been fostering something else: a community. Currently comprised of 40 members between Discord and Gitter, they voted for a seven-week premine to be allocated to the developers. Two weeks will be available at launch, and the rest will be timelocked, with one week releasing every six months.
We plan to majorly expand the community via a BitcoinTalk post, which will mark the start of our marketing campaign. First, we want to have the whitepaper for Ember itself, a testnet, and a website. The whitepaper is in the works and the website has been designed. We are currently confirming if a trusted developer can create the website.
This is the current state of Ember. We look forward to its future, and will update you next Sunday on the progress we’ve made.
