A Technology Delivered
We're happy to announce that we've officially launched Lamden mainnet! Today marks a day of independence and new beginnings. Three years in the making, this milestone represents a culmination of intense efforts to deliver a novel blockchain with a revolutionary leap in performance, scalability and usability. Blockchain of today is one of complexity, high congestion, and outrageous fees. Lamden's mission is to unleash a disruptive solution to these challenges and make blockchain fast, user-friendly, and cost-effective.

What is Lamden Mainnet?
Lamden's engineers aimed to not only deliver on the original promises of blockchain but to revolutionize it. Lamden tackles the fundamental challenges of blockchain head-on, from high barriers to entry to poor performance and scalability.

Easy to Use
Lamden's open-source, Python-native platform empowers developers to focus on quickly building blockchain applications, instead of learning new programming languages and messing around with complex syntax and system architecture. This means easier development and faster revenue generation on Lamden.

Highly Performant and Scalable
Lamden uses an array of advanced algorithms to remain highly performant and scalable as demand increases for on-chain activity and large-scale applications. Lamden is engineered to achieve sub-second transaction finality and to scale linearly with additional CPU cores, as described here. There are no Ethereum-style "gas-wars" on Lamden because the system uses a first-in-first-out queuing algorithm which prevents people from paying more to get ahead of the line and further congest the network.

A Developer Incentives System
Lamden has a built-in rewards distribution system with voteable and configurable parameters. Developers who create applications on Lamden will be awarded a percentage of transaction fees processed through their smart contracts, thereby earning revenue automatically from their applications without relying on third-party payment services. Incentives are made with Lamden's native coin TAU and sent straight to the developer's wallet. Because revenue is tied to transaction volume, developers will earn more revenue as their DApps become more popular.
For an introductory period, developers will automatically earn 90% of all TAU used to transact against their smart contracts.

A Self-Regulating System
Lamden has a self-regulating governance system where the community nodes have direct voting rights on key decisions including rewards distribution, transaction rates, and platform functionality upgrades. The system naturally strives for an equilibrium where each network participant will act in their best interest to maximize their reward. No single party controls the Lamden network and no single party can monopolize it.

Mainnet Token Swap
Now that mainnet is live, a token swap from Ethereum ERC20 TAU to Lamden Mainnet TAU will commence. The swap period will be open for approximately 6 months and is mandatory. If you do not swap your ERC20 TAU tokens during the 6 month swap window, you will be unable to do so afterwards.

IMPORTANT: Do not send ERC20 tokens to the Lamden wallet or they will be lost forever! ERC20 tokens are not compatible with the Lamden network. The only way to get your ERC20 TAU onto the Lamden network is by following the wallet token swap process.

The swap process is built directly into the Lamden wallet, which you can download on the Lamden website..

Bloomberg News reporter Mathew Leising's new book, "Out of the Ether: The Amazing Story of Ethereum and the $55 Million Heist That Almost Destroyed It All", tells the story of the infamous DAO hack that almost brought down the world's second-largest blockchain.

In June 2016, a here-to-now unknown assailant (or assailants) began syphoning off funds from Ethereum's first decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, a bit of software that functions like a corporation. Weeks earlier the DAO went live, following a $150 million crowd sale.

"[T]he DAO had a huge part to play in the early history of Ethereum," Leising writes. "It's not overstating it to say that the DAO made Ethereum." That's because it was one of the earliest examples that Ethereum's network of computers was resilient enough to support complex applications.

While the attack never broke Ethereum's code – it merely exploited a loophole in The DAO's smart contract – it cast doubt over the viability of a blockchain-based "world computer." It was also the beginning of Ethereum's two Ethereums.

Leising, who has been covering the crypto industry for the better half of a decade, had called out sick from work the day a hacker absconded with $55 million in stolen ETH. But he didn't let the story die. Over the past four years he has been reporting out the story told in the book, examining blockchain data, following through on cryptic tips and ultimately tracing a path towards his leading suspect.

In the excerpt below, readers find themselves in eastern Germany along with Christoph Jentzsch, one of The DAO's principle architects, who woke up to realize the project he has spent months building is being robbed "at the rate of about $8 million an hour."

A religious family man, Jentzsch takes this extemporaneous moment to reflect on the challenges that faced the DAO's creation – from securities worries that still plague token projects to the critical opinions of the early Ethereum community – before taking action. – Dan Kuhn

Chapter 7
The town of Mittweida in the state of Saxony in Germany escaped being bombed in the Second World War. In the middle of town, old stone streets divide rows of brightly colored buildings. If you leave the town square and walk for about 10 minutes you'll come to a quiet street with a police station; next door is a mint-green house with brown trim and shutters. On Friday, June 17, 2016, just after 8 a.m., Christoph Jentzsch lay on the beige carpet of the first-floor office inside. He tried to still his breathing, to take deep breaths, to not let the world get away from him. Thieves were inside the DAO, his creation, robbing it at the rate of about $8 million an hour.

One of the first things Christoph felt was relief: finally the DAO saga would come to an end. It had overtaken his life for the past six months.

He'd battled anxiety and depression and exhaustion; he'd neglected his wife and five kids. There had been moments when he froze at the thought of releasing the DAO code, because once it was out in the world it couldn't be changed. There could be a bug in the software, or maybe terrorists could figure out how to use it to fund an attack he'd be power- less to stop. The pressure made him physically ill several times. He'd puked under the strain. God, please, let this be the end of all that.

But Christoph also felt a strong sense of responsibility. It shook him that he'd messed up so badly and that people were losing money because of it. He believed in the ideas underpinning DAOs. (The language gets a bit confusing here as there were other DAOs around at this point, MakerDAO among them. DAO is a generic term for the structure that smart contracts fit into, but because of its eventual size and high profile, Jentzsch's DAO became the DAO.)

THERE WERE SO MANY FEARS," GRIFF SAID."DOES THIS DESTROY ETHEREUM? DOES THIS DESTROY DAOS? WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN TO ALL THIS MONEY?

A DAO is what got him into Ethereum in the first place, the moment he realized its potential. Vitalik's white paper had outlined a vision for how DAOs could democratize corporate structures to replace owners, employees, and investors with users who directly managed the firm's affairs with smart contracts encoded on the blockchain. That breakthrough is what made Christoph pause his PhD studies and start working for Ethereum in 2015. And then, improbably, he built one: the biggest DAO ever built, in fact, which made it a fat target. After all the security checks, Christoph couldn't understand why no one had found the right bug in time.

He got up from the floor of the office and went back to his IBM ThinkPad laptop. Christoph knew the cops next door couldn't help him. No, this was his mess and he'd have to clean it up.

In one sense, if toasters and door locks were allowed to have bank accounts the DAO never would have happened.