Parity Technologies, the developer of the second most popular Ethereum client Parity Ethereum has revealed that it is planning to cede its maintenance role of the client as it focuses its attention on the development of the Ethereum competitor Polkadot.
Parity announced on Monday that it is looking into establishing a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that will be in charge of maintaining and developing the Parity Client which will henceforth be renamed to OpenEthereum.
The specifics on the development of a DAO are not yet finalized as the Ethereum startup awaits further talks with the ecosystem stakeholders including the Ethereum Foundation, Gnosis, POA Network and ETC Labs.
“The Parity Ethereum codebase and maintenance will be transitioned to a DAO ownership and maintainer model,” the announcement noted. “We hope this new model can provide the basis for cross-organization collaboration to ensure the codebase gets the attention it needs to realize its full potential.” The company added that the “structures and details are in development, but our intention is to transfer the license to the DAO and move the codebase to its own GitHub organization and rename the client accordingly.”
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The launch of the DAO will mark a significant move by Parity Technologies away from active development on the Ethereum blockchain. The company has over the years been dedicating more and more time to other projects outside Ethereum including Bitcoin, Ethereum Classic, Zcash, and Substrate.
Over the recent past, the company has been dedicating more time to the development of Polkadot, a project that is backed by a new entity dubbed the Web3 Foundation. Coincidentally, Web3 Foundation is co-founded by Ethereum co-creator and Parity Technologies founder Gavin Wood.
One of Ethereum’s core developers and a member of the Parity team Afri Schoedon tweeted a controversial tweet earlier this year in which he said that “Polkadot delivers what Serenity ought to be.”
Angry members of the Ethereum community criticized his apparent conflict of interest. At the time of his tweet, Schoedon was in charge of coordinating Ethereum hard forks while at the same time working on the development of the Polkadot blockchain. The blowback from the Ethereum community members saw the developer quit active development and public involvement with the Ethereum network and transitioned full-time onto Polkadot.
With the transition of Parity Client over to a DAO structure for maintenance and active development, Parity Technologies is also forfeiting a grant from the Ethereum Foundation that was to be used in the development of the client.
“We look forward to continuing the conversation about this transition over the coming weeks,” Parity wrote urging the community to “Consider this an open invitation for all to participate in the future of the Parity Ethereum client.”
