Our commitment to Ethereum and a decentralised future

We are early pioneers in a new industry where software is money, and one oversight can cost millions to the very users we work so hard to support. We started Parity Technologies in 2015 with the goal to build the fastest and most secure software for Ethereum and the decentral web. This was before there was mainstream interest in blockchain and Ethereum. We were excited to pioneer technologies that enabled others to explore these promising technologies. Attention grew rapidly and so did the value at stake — much faster than anyone had expected.

Making mistakes has changed and matured us. We have refocused our development work and retired the multi-sig wallet, among other things. Where we have to use smart contracts (such as for our bridges), we have completely revamped how we write smart contracts, starting from scratch with everything we have done and will do in the future. We have more rigorous testing, deployment processes, and stringent third-party audit requirements in place. We are employing best practices and tools as proposed by the community and our auditing partner, Trail of Bits. We have read the community’s comments and requests, and are using them to build better Parity technology.

All of us at Parity Technologies are deeply sorry to the users who remain unable to access their ether as a result of a bug in our code. We have been in constant conversation with affected projects and believe that those in the community who have stuck ether, either through the wallet freeze or, for example, issues such as those listed in EIP-156, have a case for attempting to recover the property.

Although the debate around the recovery has been challenging for everyone, it has uncovered numerous important issues and helped us all come to a better understanding of the underlying arguments. It has also clearly shown the importance of a transparent governance process that can respond to the community’s position on contentious issues such as ASIC resistance, supply caps, and contract restorations. This debate has advanced a tough conversation and we’re encouraged by the thoughtful discourse.

Let us make clear: we have no intention to split the Ethereum chain. We plan to continue to work with the community to find a path forward. We have all dedicated a great deal of time and effort to developing the Ethereum ecosystem, and have no intention of harming what we have helped build. We believe Ethereum is a crucial piece of the decentralised web infrastructure and are fully committed to making the platform open, scalable, and safe today and in the future.

Meanwhile, we continue with our commitment to build better tools and improve the ecosystem. There’s a greater vision here:

• A decentral web where users retain their agency
• A world where access to information is an unsuppressable human right
• A world where all 7.4 billion people have open access to finance
• A society less reliant on skewed institutional powers

Some of the projects we are working on to build this vision are:

• Light Client, a fast and secure client for low-performant devices
• Parity Bridge, a short-term scaling solution for DApps
• Substrate, a foundation for safely experimenting with new ideas on sharding, encryption, and governance
• Polkadot, a next-generation protocol to power a decentralised web
• Secret Store, a distributed key generator that also stores keys to enable permissioning
• Private Transactions, encrypted smart contracts where the code and state are viewable only by permissioned validators
• Parity Signer, a mobile hardware wallet for securely signing transactions
• oo7 Bonds, a library that makes it easy to build reactive DApps in Javascript
• Pluggable consensus, allowing organisations to choose different consensus mechanisms such as Proof-of-Work, AuRa, and Tendermint.
• p-Wasm, a low-level Web Assembly library for creating smart contracts with Rust
• Libp2p, the Rust implementation of the libp2p networking stack we’re building in collaboration with Protocol Labs
• Kovan testnet, a Proof-of-Authority network that supports Wasm and Parity Bridge
• And of course our clients, Parity Ethereum, Parity Bitcoin, which support a multitude of networks including ETC, BCH, and more

As always, the vast majority of our software is free to use and completely open source. Come build a better, decentralized web with us.

Originally published at paritytech.io on April 26, 2018.