Ethereum Announces Official Launch Date

Ethereum has announced the official release date of the first ‘Frontier’ version, and provided a specific ‘how to’ guide for setting up mining clients, clarifying some confusion about the release process.

Liftoff

Staying true to the decentralization ethos, the Ethereum team has elaborated on their ‘launch’ plan, which as they mentioned in a recent blog post, will be more of a grass roots emergence of the network rather than a ‘launch’ from a central point. 

In the blog post, Stephan Tual explained that “In the interest of decentralization and transparency, Ethereum will not provide the Genesis block as a download, but instead have created an open source script that anyone can use to generate the file.”

The community will need to generate the Genesis block from the open source script, using a hash of block 1,028,201 of the current Ethereum testnet. This number was chosen because it “turns out to be both prime and palindromic, just the way we like it,” said Tual.

Roughly speaking, and depending on where you are located, this block will come to be at around late July 29 to early July 30, according to ethdev statistics. 

Let the trading begin?

Many followers, investors and speculators are likely waiting for the moment when Ether trading on exchanges will begin. Exactly which exchanges will be trading, however is not yet clear.

One rumor on an ‘’Ethereum observation thread” on Bitcointalk, stated that Poloneix will be one of them. The forum user also points out that “Gatecoin Exchange is allowing buy order sides” and quotes Ethereum saying that “Several exchanges will support Ethereum on launch,” but offers no source.

Either way, all the major exchanges will likely be trading it soon. However, this will not begin during block 1,028,201 due to a security precaution. To make sure the network emerges smoothly, there will be a ‘thawing’ period for “3 to 4 days,” which will effectively make trading during those days, not possible.

Tual writes: 

“Initial ‘Thawing': Gas limits during the first few days. The first software release of Frontier will have a hardcoded Gas limit per block of 5,000 Gas. Unlike the normal Gas per block parameter, this special limit will not grow proportionally to the network usage – effectively preventing transacting during the first few days. This ‘thawing’ period will enable miners to start their operations and early adopters to install their clients without having to ‘rush’. After a few days (likely 3-4, but this could change), we’ll release a small software update which all clients will have to install. This update will see the Gas limit per block raised to 3 million, an initial number from which it will expand or contract as per the default miner settings.” 

Beware of the wild net

Finally, Tual warns the users to “be especially wary of third party websites and software of unknown origin” adding that “Ethereum will only ever publish software through its github platform at https://github.com/ethereum/.”