ConsenSys can be best described as a software foundry.
It facilitates a variety of applications which operate on the Ethereum blockchain, and coordinates, incubates, accelerates, and spawns what it calls “spoke ventures.” For example, there’s uPort, which is identity management, the popular Truffle development suite, MetaMask, which links your web browser to Ethereum, and Gnosis, the prediction market platform we mentioned in the previous section.
And here are some of the many other spoke ventures in Consensys.
The Ethereum community also spawns a lot of original research.
Most notably is Casper, the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake implementation that we’ve mentioned a couple times in this module.
There are two main implementations of Casper, and this is one of the topics we’ll dive into in our second course.
There’s also Plasma, a proposed scalability upgrade to Ethereum inspired by a similar scalability proposal for Bitcoin called Lightning.
You can see the resemblance in the name.
And this is a bit less directly associated with the main Ethereum project, but there have been efforts to port Ethereum over to another blockchain platform called Cosmos, which claims to be the internet of blockchains.
The project is called Ethermint, because it runs Ethereum on a modular blockchain system called Tendermint.
We’ll go into this, and also Plasma, in our next course.