Hilarious parody ICO raises funds to make Ethereum’s founder buff AF

We have reached the peak of initial coin offerings. Mocking the recent ICO mania , an opportunistic entrepreneur has launched a new coin offering that is raising funds to help Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin “get better health and become a fitter person.”

“ Because some people are much too busy thinking about our future… They’ve forgotten to think about theirs,” the FitVitalik page reads. “ We, the crypto currency [sic] community, have made it our mission to help one altruistic yet self-neglectful [sic] genius at a time.”

“ We’re talking about Vitalik Buterin!”

All funds amassed during the coin offering will go towards getting Buterin a gym membership, a personal trainer, and a healthy diet. The FitVitalik team says that, as long as he meets his “goal to get into shape,” the Ethereum founder is free to choose a gym and a coach of his choice.

The only limitation is that he never splurges out more than $4,000 from the FitVitalik fund per month.

Much like any other “legitimate” initial coin offering, FitVitalik has provided prospective investors with an inspirational mission statement and a scientifically-proven roadmap to success.

“A lot of people are concerned about Vitalik’s health and this ICO will change his future,” the FitVitalik agenda reads. “We need more cool stuff from Vitalik, we need healthy Ethereum and we need healthy leader that will create more products and will finally make Ethereum get to the moon.”

The FitVitalik management has also taken the steps to promote its ICO on all popular cryptocurrency discussion boards and online venues, including Telegram , Facebook , Twitter , Reddit , and the quintessential BitcoinTalk . So you know all they do is absolutely “legit” and by the book.

For those considering this once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity, the FitVitalik ICO kicks off this weekend on November 25. It will run for 14 days or until it has successfully hit its hard cap of 2,000 ETH.

All goofing-around aside, Buterin has established himself as one of the most influential and respected figures within the cryptocommunity, with numerous supporters crafting fan art to pay homage to both him and Ethereum.

In fact, Buterin fan art is quite popular on Reddit – though FitVitalik does really take this trend to a whole new level.

Head out to FitVitalik here to check out the full page. It’s pretty funny.

Blockchain bug hunters feature prominently at this year’s Pwnie Awards

Researchers have been diligently prodding cryptocurrency and blockchain companies for kinks in their security – and it seems some of them are finally getting recognition for their work.

Three researchers are up for Pwnie Awards this year – an annual showcase of the best and worst in information security. Little toy ponies are given to the most deserving hackers and security researchers.

MIT Digital Currency Initiative director Neha Narula and Boston University researcher Ethan Heilman have been nominated for “Best Cryptographic Attack” after cracking a hash function in popular cryptocurrency IOTA. In addition to that, ConsenSys security engineer Bernard Mueller is also up for “Most Innovative Research” for his work on securing Ethereum smart contracts.

Cracking IOTA’s hash function

Forging IOTA transactions was apparently achievable “in just a few minutes,” according to Narula and Heilman. The pair discovered a method that allowed funds to be stolen directly from users wallets. They attribute the security hole directly to IOTA’s implementation of its hashing algorithm.

The vulnerability was originally discovered last year, and IOTA has since addressed it in a series of blog posts . While Narula and Heilman are clear to state that the exploitable attack vectors have been plugged, they do note that the faulty hash function is still being used in some parts of the IOTA platform.

Keeping smart contracts secure

Muller is nominated for his extensive research on the security of Ethereum’s blockchain. His paper , titled Smashing Smart Contracts for Fun and Real Profit , introduces a new security analysis tool for smart contracts called Mythril.

He pokes fun at the tech community for not “learning much since 1996,” with a myriad of security vulnerabilities stemming from a reliance on older programming languages when creating smart contracts. Myrthil is Muller’s contribution to smart contract security, with an intention to remove bugs that may lead to money loss.

Muller’s research also celebrates the modern hacking infrastructure. He does note, though, that the dawn of Ethereum’s “world computer” and its constant security concerns are eerily reminiscent of the early internet.

The awards are scheduled for later today, so we’ll update this piece with the official standings. The full list of nominations can be found here .

Ethereum will soon test sharding tech to fix scaling issues, Vitalik Buterin hints

Vitalik Buterin has made it clear that designing more efficient scaling solutions is one of the biggest challenges for the Ethereum blockchain – and it seems the company is gearing up take on this hurdle head-on. Buterin has indicated the company will soon begin testing its new scaling tech better known as sharding .

Talking about the cryptocurrency scam epidemic on Twitter, the young co-founder strongly hinted that Ethereum is close to launching its sharding testnet. While Buterin did not offer a clear timeline, he said that Leeroy – a decentralized Twitter rival – will be a suitable candidate for the experiment.

“I hope they can participate in the sharding testnet soon when it’s ready,” the founder responded to a comment asking about a verified Twitter on the blockchain.

Buterin has since purged the tweet, but you can still see the full response here:

Buterin and lead developer Nick Johnson have often stressed the central role sharding could play in Ethereum’s plan to move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake system for verifying transactions on its network.

During a talk in Taipei in November last year, Buterin laid out the company’s intention to reach Visa levels of scalability within the next three to five years, as reported by Trustnodes. Sharding was painted as a crucial part towards accomplishing this goal.

For context, Visa processes upward of 1,500 transactions per second, while Ethereum roughly handles between 10 and 30.

The way Ethereum is currently setup requires that a transaction is verified by every single validator on the blockchain, which makes the network inherently more secure but also significantly slower. Sharding basically splits the network into small partitions known as shards, with each piece containing its own independent state and transaction history.

“ In this system, certain nodes would process transactions only for certain shards, allowing the throughput of transactions processed in total across all shards to be much higher,” as explained by blockchain developer Raul Jordan explains in a blog post.

Back in September last year, Johnson also suggested that Ethereum is gradually working out its vision for sharding, calling the technology “a series of ideas under development – not a deployed system.”

It remains unclear how long it will take to rollout a functional version of Ethereum powered by sharding, but the implementation could go a long way in improving transaction efficiency, fending off network congestion and keeping the blockchain alive when the next CryptoKitties sensation arrives.

We’ve reached out to Buterin for further clarification and will update this piece accordingly if we hear back.

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