What Is Parity?
Also known as: Parity Ethereum, OpenEthereum, Parity Technologies
In short
Parity is node software developed by Parity Technologies in the Rust programming language that was once one of Ethereum's most-used clients. It was later handed over to the community as OpenEthereum and its development was discontinued.
An Ethereum client is node software run to join the network, validate blocks, and propagate transactions. Parity Ethereum stood out for its fast sync, low resource usage, and the memory safety focus of the Rust language, and it was widely used among miners, exchanges, and infrastructure providers. The same company later became the team behind Polkadot and the blockchain development framework Substrate.
The Parity name is also associated with two major incidents in 2017. A vulnerability in Parity's multisig wallet contract first led to ETH being stolen from some wallets. Later in the same year, a user accidentally took ownership of the shared library contract and destroyed it, leaving a large amount of ETH in the wallets that depended on this library permanently locked.
Parity Technologies later handed maintenance of the Ethereum client to the community, and the project took the name OpenEthereum. Because of a lack of maintainers, development of OpenEthereum was also halted; today, Ethereum uses execution clients such as Geth, Nethermind, Erigon, and Besu. The Parity case is cited as an example showing the importance of client diversity and smart contract auditing.
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