Eth News and Links
Eth1
- Turbogeth public alpha – full sync in 2 days, 650 gigs disk space
- Geth v1.9.18 bugfix release
- A backrunning patch has been merged and is scheduled for Geth v1.9.19
- Stationary behavior of EIP 1559 agent-based model
Eth2
- Validator launchpad released – the interface for eth2 stakers which is being tested now for the Aug 4 Medalla testnet launch
- Ben Edgington’s writeup of the genesis process of Eth2’s Beacon Chain
- Strategies for protecting validator keys
- If you’re looking for help with validating on Medalla, join the eth2 staker discord
EIPs/Standards
Crypto
- Microsoft’s Spartan: fast SNARKs without trusted setup
- IBM completes successful field trials on Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Layer2
- Wow! Some impressive Reddit Scaling Bakeoff submissions from layer2 (in order of submission): Starkware, Matic, OMG Network, Fuel Labs, Raiden, Arbitrum, Aztec, MatterLabs, Abridged/Kchannels, Hubble Project, Celer
- Also check out Connext’s submission on using channels between rollups
- Rollup exits with efficient witness generation
- Pessimistic rollup
This newsletter is made possible thanks to Celer Network!
Celer is a coherent layer-2 scaling platform on Ethereum. Their submission to Reddit Great Scaling Bakeoff talks about their in-production matching uses cases, why they believe state channel offers the right tradeoffs for the use cases and performance benchmarks. They also propose the concept of Layer-2 LEGO to have multiple different layer-2 techniques working together to address all current and future use cases in a coherent way.
Stuff for developers
- Solidity v0.7 breaking release with lots of backwards-incompatible syntax and semantics changes
- Truffle v5.1.37 adds syntax highlighting for Solidity v0.7
- hevm adds symbolic execution features and a tutorial for using them
- Academic paper benchmarking Eth security analysis tools
- EthCode plugin for VSCode had a new release
- Building an encrypted to-do list with 3Box tutorial
- Fairmint opensources its linear bonding curve code
- any.sender fast and cheap transaction relayer API now has zero gas overhead and a library for unit testing
- Loredana’s decentralized spreadsheets demo in her lisp-like language, Taylor
- How to create a Defi dashboard with TheGraph and GoogleSheets
- Paul Berg’s Solidity template for his favorite toolstack: Buidler + Typechain + Ethers + Waffle + Solhint + Solcover
Ecosystem
- This week we celebrated 5 years since the mainnet genesis block
- Miners pushed the block gas limit to 12.5m, so Eth’s max throughput is now 45 transactions per second. Barnabé’s analysis is that the gaslimit increase did not lower gas prices
- Ethereum has a 54 day streak of more transaction fees than Bitcoin
- Check out this very cool txstreet transaction visualizer
- A simple and easy interface to cancel pending transactions
- Ethereum.org is now available in 30 languages
- Dex volumes are threatening to pass centralized exchanges
Enterprise
- Videos from the EEA’s Ethereum in the Enterprise conference
- Securing enterprise chains with Luna HSMs and PegaSysPlus v1.2
- Hyperledger Besu v1.5.1
Application layer
- Augur v2 launched and then relaunched with no more GSN/new account fee. If you want to support this newsletter, this is an affiliate link
- Synthetix decommissions its foundation in favor of 3 DAOs
- Aave revamping its token model; migrating LEND to AAVE to govern the protocol; adding stakers for safety
- How to protect yourself against hacks with Nexus Mutual
- YFI and forks had quite a week: a fork called YFII catching fire in China before getting removed from the Balancer UI, YFI started farming YFII and dumping it, and then a different fork (YYFI) was a scam where the owner drained the Balancer pool
- dForce is back doing a similar yield aggregation
- MakerDAO hit 1 billion USD in value locked up
Tokens/Business/Regulation
- What if Eth had EIP1559 when the network launched?
- Coinbase is adding 2% a year rewards to holding DAI with them
- How ArCoin got SEC permission to do a treasury fund on Eth
- 1inch’s Chi gastoken: how to hedge against gas prices
- ResearchCoin is live to be earned (minted in future) where you earn tokens for uploading, summarizing and discussing scientific research
- Sign of the times: flippening.watch returns
General
- Identity index: standard for creating a unified, decentralized identity-centric resource index
- TheGraph launches incentivized testnet
- Ledger data breach: 1 million emails and 9500 physical addresses
- 3 kids arrested for hacking Twitter and taking over accounts a couple weeks ago
- ETC got 51% attacked again and the price went up
Job Listings
- Trail of Bits is looking for: blockchain security engineer & cryptography analyst
- 0x is looking for all kinds of devs: full-stack, back-end, and front-end
- Celer Network: Android developer
- Join one of the fastest-growing teams in blockchain: 19+ open roles at Chainlink
Want your job listing here? $250 per line (~75 character limit including spaces), payable in ETH/DAI/USDC to evan.ethereum.eth. Questions? thecryptonewspodcast at-gmail
Watch this space
If you want to follow me on Twitter, I got @evan_van_ness back after being suspended for a week for no reason, but after 3 weeks @WeekInEthNews is still suspended for the crime of (checks notes) trying to upload a profile picture. Twitter is truly the most shamelessly incompetent company.
Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-august-2-2020/
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Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
- Aug 2 – ENS grace period begins to end
- Aug 4 – Medalla Eth2 testnet launch viewing party
- Aug 9-11 – EDCON
- Aug 28-29 – Chainlink’s Smart Contract Virtual Summit
- Oct 2-30 – EthOnline hackathon
- Nov 6-7 – virtual Trufflecon