Parity Technologies Ltd (formerly known as Ethcore) the blockchain core technology company and creator of the Parity Ethereum software announced version 1.6.2 of their Ethereum client has been released.
The light Ethereum client is integrated directly into your web browser and can be used to access all the features of the Ethereum network including powerful decentralized applications and the multitude of cryptocurrencies issued on Ethereum. Parity is currently available for Windows, Ubuntu/Debian, OSX and as a Docker container.
The major release introduced a few new features including:
- Revamped UI
- Account Vaults – store all the metadata – address, name, and description amongst other information – encrypted. To avoid you having to remember a second password for each wallet, wallets are placed into groups that share the same metadata password. Such a group is a vault.
- Support for Ledger hardware wallet devices – support is integrated into both Parity Wallet and the Parity Client, meaning that support is provided for wallet usage in headless server operations as well as the more usual Parity Wallet browser-side. In doing this support, some important infrastructure was introduced into Parity, so hopefully supporting other hardware wallets is not far away.
- Stratum protocol for PoW mining – a protocol allowing the efficient reporting of new workloads for miners. Simply start parity with –stratum and it’ll be pushing out events on port 8008 by default, ready for use with Genoil’s ethminer.
- A new macOS installer. Parity for macOS now includes a Menu Bar icon that allows controlling Parity service – “experimental” Mac installer is no longer experimental! Rather than installing as an invisible process, Parity now lives in Mac’s menubar allowing it to be started and stopped easily.
- Disk-backed transaction store – pending transactions are now saved to disk and won’t get lost when Parity is restarted.
- Improved memory management – now supports a memory footprint oriented state pruning model. This allows you to set the target amount of memory to consume in maintaining the pruning history, and means no more dreaded “out of memory” problems should the network again undergo unprecedented amounts of state bloat, while still retaining as large a history as possible in order to avert the issue of “fork-lock” seen on PoW testnets.
The Parity team stated:
“We’re hard at work preparing our Spring release, 1.7, for your pleasure; upcoming we have 2-factor wallets, an enhanced transaction inspection and development environment, HD account chains, the Parity light-client protocol and the various improvements to the Ethereum protocol that will make up Metropolis.”
Parity is actively developed as an open source project on GitHub.