Eth News and Links
Mainnet execution layer
- Latest core devs call. Notes from Tim Beiko
- London EIPs: EIP1559: Fee market change, EIP3198: BASEFEE opcode, EIP3554: Difficulty Bomb Delay to December, EIP3529: Reduction in gas refunds, EIP3541: Reject new contracts starting with 0xEF
- JSON RPC to use same naming as EIP1559
- Baikal – London devnet for devs to experiment with London until the testnet fork dates
- London blocks/dates: Ropsten: 10399301 (June 9), Goerli: 4979794 (June 16), Rinkeby: 8813188 (June 23), mainnet aim is July 14
- Block access list
- Core dev apprenticeship program, an effort by Piper Merriam to find and train more core devs
EIPs/Standards
- EIP3554: Difficulty Bomb Delay to December 1st 2021
- ERC3569: Sealed NFT Metadata
- ERC3561: Trust Minimized Upgradeability Proxy
Proof of stake consensus layer
- Huge milestone on the way to turning off PoW: Nocturne testnet successfully launched with 12 combinations of consensus and mainnet clients. It’s processing transactions and reaching finality.
- Checkout the block explorer, live for a couple more days
- Latest merge implementers call; Nocturne is last merge devnet until post London/Altair
- Lighthouse v1.4.0 planned for mid-June: 80% Eth1 call reduction, uses 50% less RAM, Altair support, Doppelganger slashing protection, remote signer and beta Windows support
Layer2
- Arbitrum mainnet launches for devs on May 28. Last testnet includes a sequencer for instant transactions.
- Loopring zkrollup hits $1B in trading volume
- Ethhole.link: token flow visualization from Ethereum to L2 and sidechains
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Stuff for developers
- web3.js v1.3.6 security patch for underscore and bumps versions of ENS and Ethers
- UMA’s Optimistic Oracle via dispute resolution process. Out of beta; no need to use UMA’s financial contracts
- Gnosis Safe L2/sidechain rollout plan so you can secure DAO treasuries and privileged smart contract functions such as upgrades on L2/sidechains
- Alchemy Transfer API to access historical Eth, ERC20 and ERC721 transfers in single call
Security
- Slither v0.8 – improved Solidity v0.8 support, better Hardhat support, 3 new detectors
- xToken exploit resulted in $25m loss, due to logic error allowing infinite mint
- yEarn finds a missing check on a low level call; no funds lost
- Fei awards $800k bounty for bonding curve price manipulation vulnerability.
Ecosystem
- After dog memecoins were using over 10% of Ethereum’s gas, Vitalik donated billions (in notional value, it wasn’t even nearly liquid) in memecoins to India Covid Relief, longevity research, Charter Cities Institute, Gitcoin multisig, etc. Vitalik’s trades were getting sandwiched/backrun, so he used Flashbots via Archerswap
- Flashbots Dashboard shows ~$45m miner profit from Flashbots. ~85% of hashpower now uses Flashbots. A third of blocks now have a bundle
- Etherscan adds ENS names to transaction lists
- Wallet composability: analyzing the layers of the wallet stack
- ETHGlobal’s Scaling Ethereum hackathon finalists
Enterprise
- Covantis claims 80% decrease in supply chain error rates in 3 months since going live with Quorum
- Why governments and enterprises will move from private chains to Eth mainnet
Application layer
- Vitalik proposes UNI should be an oracle token for ETH/USD
- Balancer V2 is live with 40-53% reduction in gas
- Creating pegged tokens to see if unit bias matters: Woofy is 1 million Woofy per YFI or Breaker which is 1 billion per MKR
- MerriamWebster sold an NFT of its NFT definition
- Christie’s auctioned 9 Cryptopunks for ~$17m
Regulation/business/tokens
- A Bitcoiner flips: why ETH will win the store of value war
- Justin Drake values ETH using EVM fees
- One more flip: ETH is more secure than BTC
- Tesla will no longer accept BTC and will look at energy efficient cryptocurrencies
- Tether discloses the assets backing USDT. Half of the assets are commercial paper
- US DOJ and IRS investigating Binance for money laundering
- Rise of micro economies: enabling a creator middle class
General
- Fragattacks. WiFi design and implementation security vulnerabilities – be extra sure to update your devices over the next few months
- Etherscan hits the Alexa top 1000
- Boring Crypto web3 news aggregator with no price talk
- Palla’s noob-friendly glossary for the Merge, the Flippening, PoW, and PoS
- Week in Ethereum News has a new editor
Job Listings
- Synthetix are hiring: Growth Marketer, Senior Designer
- Ethereum Foundation hiring a Cryptography Researcher – ZK VMs
- Devcon needs a Python developer for L2 Pretix integration
- OpenZeppelin is hiring Security Researchers, Devs & Community
- Props: General Manager/SaaS Division, Blockchain Engineer & Data Analyst.
- BitGo’s WBTC team is hiring Blockchain Engineers, Sr. Blockchain Engineers and Lead Blockchain Engineers. (You can check out the rest of our jobs here!)
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Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-may-16-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
- May 18-21 – EY Global Blockchain Summit
- May 21 – Linda Xie and Austin Griffith talk Eth dev tooling
- May 28 – optimistic rollup Arbitrum launches
- May 28-30 – ETHGlobal’s Web3 Weekend
- May 31 – deadline to apply for Eth core dev apprenticeship
- June 18 – July 9 – ETHGlobal – Hack Money 2021
- June 25-27 – Edcon (online)
- July 14 – tentative date for London hard fork (Ropsten June 9, Goerli June 16, Rinkeby June 23)
- July 20-22 – EthCC4 (Paris)
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