Ethereum Launches Frontier, a Decentralized Software Platform
| Updatedby Tatsiana Yablonskaya · 3 min read
Ethereum announced the launch in its blog describing the potential of the new project.
Ethereum, a decentralized platform running smart contracts, has announced the launch of Frontier. The blog post was published by Stephan Tual, Ethereum’s CCO, yesterday.
Ethereum is a blockchain-based virtual machine originally started by Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood. By the way Mr. Buterin has already become the winner at the WTN’s 2014 summit and therefore joined the illustrious circle of recipients nominated by the World Technology Network each year.
Unlike digital currencies it doesn’t provide monetary value for transactions – in its turn it offers user-defined services. It features digital (smart) contracts created by users. Contracts are made and deployed to the blockchain by users as computer codes. The advantage is that blockchain saves them forever and designer is the only one who can deal with his contracts without any possibility of censorship by a third party.
Ethereum has come a long way to the development of Frontier – it took the project one year and a half to come up with the first version. The launch of Frontier is of a great importance but is only the first step which will be followed by three more releases called Homestead, Metropolis and Serenity.
The team of Ethereum expressed a great gratitude to all encouraging them: “We are thanking each and everyone for support during the past year and half. It’s incredible to see the progress that has taken place since that humble first commit on Christmas Eve 2013. The vision of a censorship-proof ‘world computer’ that anyone can program, paying exclusively for what they use and nothing more, is now a reality.”
Ethereum adviced everyone who is interested first of all to visit their forums where they can find loads of useful information. In previous posts Stephan has already explained the main principals of work with Frontier. He writes that everything users will have to do is to generate and upload the Genesis block into their Ethereum client.
The block looks much alike a database file – it stores all Ether transactions. Once a user loads it into the client, he displays willingness to join the network under offered terms. Ethereum team cares about decentralization and transparency.
Thus it claimed that has no plans to provide the Genesis block as a download. Instead it has created an open source script for anyone to use in order to generate the file, a link to which will appear later in the articles of Ethereum blog.
Ethereum describes Frontier as “a command line only interface with a Javascript environment that allows building, testing, deploying and using decentralized applications on the Ethereum blockchain”. The company admits proudly that exploring the Frontier offers vast opportunities, but warns about potential dangers. The project is not for everyone – it is aimed first of all at developers.
