Ethereum Releases an Update About Its Future Plans and Progress

On April 26, 2019, Ethereum (ETH)'s core developer announced that a third-party audit of their Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC)-resistant algorithm for proof of work has been funded. The developer, Hudson Jameson, made this announcement to investors and other interested parties during the firm's most recent bi-weekly meeting.

During the conference call, Jameson specified that the desired funding amount of 50,000 units of decentralized stable coin DAI had been received. The stable coin is Ethereum-based and USD-pegged. The funds were crowd-sourced through donations from a variety of individuals, according to the reports from people who participated in the call.

Jameson also explained that the audit is set to start either the week of April 29 or the week of May 6. Staying on track with these target dates will help keep their donors and investors happy.

The ASIC refers to mining hardware that makes use of single-purpose chips. Those chips are tailored to efficiently mine cryptocurrency. They do this based on a specific hashing type of algorithm. The setups that use high-powered and reusable graphics processing units, or GPUs, are less specialized. This means that up until now, those GPUs have struggled to compete for rewards on the high-traffic networks that deploy the ASICs.

The program for proof of work strives to decrease the efficiency advantage of using ASICs over GPUs in the industry. In an earlier report from February 2019, there were reports that after the program for proof of work was initially implemented, many of the core developers of the program changed their minds. They instead decided to delay their decision to move forward until the third-party audit had been completed.

According to a recent analysis performed by some of the cryptocurrency analysts and journalists, the stable coin DAI had been struggling to keep its peg to the United States dollar. However, its proponents seem to still believe that it will still become the cryptocurrency industry's standard or default stable coin. Only time will tell if this is the case, so interested parties, donors and investors should stay tuned into the Ethereum news and press releases.