Introducing Pantheon

This week, the work I’ve been doing for the past 6 months, and that PegaSys has been working on for the past 18 months or so was released into the world. Specifically we’ve released Pantheon 0.8.1, our new MainNet compatible, Apache 2 licensed, Java-based Ethereum client. And it’s open source.

I’m pretty excited about it on a few fronts. Firstly I think it’s a pretty important thing for the Ethereum community. To be a healthy ecosystem, Ethereum needs to have diversity in its clients to avoid a bug in one client taking out or accidentally hard forking the entire network. Currently though, Geth and Parity dominate the Ethereum client landscape. Pantheon clearly won’t change that in the short term, but it is backed by significant engineering resources to help it keep up with the ever changing Ethereum landscape and be a dependable option.

I’m also really excited that Pantheon is released under the Apache 2.0 license. Both Parity and Geth along with most other clients are licensed under the GPL or LGPL. There are still a large number of enterprises that completely avoid the GPL and LGPL which has closed off Ethereum to them. Having Pantheon available under a permissive license and in a highly familiar language like Java will make it much easier for many enterprises to start using, building on and innovating with Ethereum.

Pantheon will also be building out functionality from the Enterprise Ethereum standard for things like privacy and permissioning to make private chains more powerful and flexible. Meanwhile we have a significant number of researches continuing to work on developing new ways to get the most out of Ethereum.

Finally I’m quite excited to be able to contribute to an open source project as my full time job. I’ve had the opportunity to do some open source for work in the past but only on a fairly small scale. It’s a bit daunting to have everything in the open and on the record, but I’m really looking forward to engaging with the community and being able to show exactly what I’ve been doing.