Hey all! I have an important topic for discussion.

We ran into issues starting the ProgPoW audit. We had a hardware partner who specialized in ASICs who was going to work with Least Authority to perform the hardware parts of the audit. They are no longer participating in the audit so we are looking for other auditors for the hardware portion. We have some good candidates, but this effectively delays the start of the audit much more than we anticipated. Because of this I am unsure if the audit will be complete before Istanbul. On top of that I am not sure if anyone has sorted the funding situation in order to build an open source ProgPoW miner.

We have 2 options:

Delay ProgPoW until the hardfork after Istanbul. Have ProgPoW as it’s own hardfork to be implemented once the audit is done.

This is not an ideal situation at all, but despite our best efforts it is what we have before us.

This post was also posted in the AllCoreDevs Gitter chat (https://gitter.im/ethereum/AllCoreDevs) for further feedback.