Eth News and Links
Mainnet
- Berlin upgrade fork is happening: Ropsten forked this week relatively uneventfully (found a small Besu issue). Reminder: EIPs are 2565 (lowers cost of ModExp precompile), 2718 (typed transaction envelope), 2929 (anti-DOS measure to increase gas costs for state access), and 2930 (optional access lists, mitigates some 2929 gas increases)
- Update your clients! Latest Berlin-ready client releases: Besu v21.1.1, Geth v1.10.1, Nethermind v1.10.41, OpenEthereum v3.2
- Restesteth (test generator) v0.1 with access lists
- Why we should do verkle trees and per-epoch state expiry together
- EVM object format, alternative to EVM versioning and BEGINDATA
- Account abstraction via flashbots?
- Vitalik’s history of ideas that never made it in: async only, automated load balancing shards, SSTORE big objects in one slot, parallel execution
EIPs/Standards
- ERC3345: Call chaining standard
- ERC3361: JSON-RPC method to sign Ethereum messages
- EIP3369: Brick current ASICs with minor Ethash mod
- EIP3368: increase block rewards
Proof of Stake (stakers: update your Ethereum mainnet clients for Berlin)
- Latest proof of stake call. Notes from Alex Stokes and Ben Edgington: lots of client updates, first upgrade named Altair, new Prater devnet, improving fork choice discussion, and talk about going full proof of stake for Ethereum
- Mikhail Kalinin’s spec to end proof of work in pull release form
- A quick and dirty method to end PoW on an accelerated timeframe by running mainnet nodes and PoS nodes and modifying fork choice on the mainnet nodes
- How exchanges get much better security than PoW chains even without finality in Casper FFG.
- Latest what’s new in eth2: the rush to turn off PoW?
Layer2
- Explaining StarkEx’s conditional transactions for fast withdrawals from l2 to l1
- A practical example of the difference between l2 and sidechains
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Stuff for developers
- OpenZeppelin Sentinel monitoring and alerting
- Reimplementing Nexus Mutual’s bonding curve implementation to prevent high MCR vulnerability
- Scaffold-eth and optimism starter pack
- Harmony: open source transaction pool explorer
- Ape Safe: preview GnosisSafe transactions from local mainnet fork
- wighawag updates boilerplate for Solidity contract development
Security/incidents
- Dodo hacked for 2.1m from an unprotected init
- One Zerion user gets hit for $30k due to fake Balancer pool in interface, so now Zerion checks pools against Balancer code on chain
- The private key got compromised to Roll’s hotwallet, with the hacker selling Roll’s portion (~$6m) of personal tokens
Ecosystem
- GPUs can transcode video on Livepeer with nearly zero loss in hashpower (2 old GPUs made almost $1000 in a month?)
- Vitalik: making the ecosystem more friendly to light clients
- You can now backup your TornadoCash deposits onchain (but not with hardware wallets)
Enterprise
- Quorum v21.1 – makes it easier to launch mainnet, new db format with lower storage and better performance
Application layer
- Beeple everyday collage sells for $69.3m at Christie’s to MetaKovan
- Dylan Field’s statement on selling Cryptopunk 7804 for ~$7.5m
- TacoBell selling NFTs on Rarible
- Aphex Twin selling NFTs on Foundation
- Digging up old cryptocollectibles from a few years ago was a thing this week: Cryptocats, Mooncats, Etheria (no links)
- Golem is back with a new version of Golem running on zkSync
- Democracy Earth’s universal basic income for proof of humanity
- Etherplay to return on a rollup
Regulation/business/tokens
- Binance is being investigated by the CFTC, per Bloomberg
- JP Morgan designing a basket of public equities with indirect crypto exposure
- Lucius Fang’s deep dive into decentralized insurance
- A protocol merger? Keep and NuCypher in discussions
- Linda Xie: A beginner’s guide to DAOs
General
- What your browser sends home to centralized servers about you when you first startup the browser
- Malware delivered via URL due to website and adtech syncs (ahem: why you should block ads with Brave)
- CVE-2021-21300: Update your git release
Job Listings
- Nomic Labs is hiring a senior dev and an engineering manager
- Powerloom Protocol is looking for Distributed Systems Engineers in Bangalore
- Build the future with ChainSafe. Rust, Golang, Solidity, TS Devs needed!
- Props: Senior Marketing Manager, Director of Finance and Marketing Intern.
- DeFi hub of Polkadot – Acala is hiring Solidity, Rust and Fullstack devs.
- Week in Ethereum News is looking for an editor.
Want your job listing here? $345 per line (~75 character limit including spaces), payable in ETH (or 345 DAI or 345 USDC) to evan.ethereum.eth. Questions? thecryptonewspodcast at-gmail
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Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-march-14-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
- Mar 19-21 – ETHGlobal’s NFT Hack
- Mar 25 – Gitcoin CLR matching grants round ends (ahem: Week in Eth News)
- Apr 9 – May 14 – ETHGlobal’s Scaling Ethereum hackathon
- April 14 – Berlin upgrade fork (testnets: Ropsten Mar 10, Goerli Mar 17, Rinkeby Mar 24)
- April 16 – Rollup community grant applications due
- April 22 – Ethereum in the Enterprise 2021
- May 14 – papers due for WoSCA 2021
- Jul 20-22 – EthCC4 (Paris)
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