Week in Ethereum News March 23, 2024

Pectra (Prague + Electra) upgrade (meta EIP7600)

Latest all core devs – consensus (ACDC) call video. Notes from Christine Kim:
- Proposal to set default local block boost to 10%
- Pectra upgrade (small fork targeting late 2024)
  - EIP7251 maxEB (increase max effective balance): added to Pectra
  - EIP7547 IL (inclusion lists): considered for inclusion in Pectra, review in 4 weeks, doing both maxEB + IL increases upgrade complexity and deprioritizes peerDAS
  - EIP7659 increase blob throughput proposal to increase to target of 8 & maximum of 16 blobs per block (up from 3/6) over 4 months
  - Light client proposals: EIP7658 light client data backfill & EIP7657 sync committee slashings
- P2P proposals: network shards, IDONTWANT control message & deprecate mplex
EIP7251 maxEB (increase max effective balance):
- Breakout call notes
EIP7547 IL (inclusion lists):
- Breakout call video and notes: plan to finalize proof of concept (PoC) specs, begin client PoC implementations & interop on a devnet
- Terence: changes to support blob transactions within existing IL design

Centralization watch: threatening the value of your ETH

🚨 Lido at 30.59% is far too close to 33.3% threshold
Client diversity (via clientdiversity.org):
- Execution layer: Geth 66% majority
  - Coinbase migrated to ~50% Nethermind
  - Geth vulnerability disclosed: all EL clients updated to safe RPC limits
  - Nethermind post mortem of January block processing issue
- Consensus layer: Prysm 38% majority
- Any client bug over 33.3% could mean loss of finality
Better geographic diversity is optimal, particularly outside of North America & Europe

Layer 1

Eric Conner & Mariano Conti campaign to raise the gas limit to 40M
Calldata.pics: live charts of calldata & blob usage
ethPandaOps:
- Attacknet: inject faults into a devnet, uses Kurtosis & Chaos Mesh
- Dencun upgrade analysis: open questions on reorg rate, attestation effectiveness & safely increasing blob parameters
Dencun diary: contributor reflections, future priorities & improvement suggestions

Client Releases

Consensus layer:
- Lighthouse v5.1.2: hotfix for block lookup duplicate requests and to stop propagation of slashings for slashed attesters
Execution layer:
- Erigon v2.59.0: post Dencun fixes
- Reth v0.2.0-beta.3: fix critical in static files that could lead to inconsistent storage state

Research

Layer 2

EIPs/Standards

EIPs:
- EIP7657: Sync committee slashings
- EIP7658: Light client data backfill
- EIP7659: Stepwise blob throughput increase
ERCs (application layer):
- ERC7656: Generalized token-linked contracts

Stuff for developers

Etherscan contract verification updated: multichain verification with single API key and suggest name tags, labels & URL
OpenSea Seaport v1.6: adds Seaport hooks
555 NFT: onchain audio & SVG
Guide to implementing stateful invariant testing with Halmos
Ethernaut-cli (tool box): built on Hardhat tasks, AI requires OpenAI API key; beta
Ec (Rust library): convert bytes into minimal number of blobs
Lodestar Prover: middleware wrapper around light client for dapps
CTFs:
- OpenZeppelin Ethernaut CTF 2024 challenges & solutions
Cyfrin Updraft adds web3 DevOps & Assembly & Formal Verification courses
Reminder: Goerli testnet sunsets Apr 17, most validators have shutdown, opportunity to research long-range attacks
- Use Sepolia testnet for application layer testing

Security

Super Sushi Samurai $4.8M exploit on Blast via transferring to self to double balance, white hat
Dolomite $1.8M exploit of old contracts, revoke approvals
ParaSwap Augustus V6 contract vulnerability, white hat, revoke approvals
AirDAO LP drained via social engineering
Finding an ERC4626 vault reentrancy, $3M was at risk
Trail of Bits: weAudit (VSCode extension), collaborative note taking & highlight code regions

Ecosystem

Enterprise

Enterprise Ethereum Alliance new leadership team: Karen Scarbrough – Executive Director, Paul Brody – Chairperson and Vanessa Grellet joins board
Google search for an ENS address shows Ether balance

Job listings: $600 for 4 issues (75 char limit). Pay using 3cities. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail

Onchain stats

Gas fees (via ultrasound.money): 16.4 to 121.8 gwei, with 32.4 gwei average
- Zero net issuance currently at 22.8 gwei
- 7k ETH net burn this week
ETHUSD: $3,107 – $3,757, currently $3,305
ETHBTC: currently 0.052 (Flippening at ~0.16)

Notable at app layer

BlackRock USD institutional digital liquidity fund (BUIDL), stable token pays dividends in tokens monthly for qualified investors
Nexus Mutual bundled protocol cover, protection for multiple protocols under a single listing

Regulation/business/tokens

Ethereum is first (“profitable”) chain where burned transaction fees are greater than lifetime issuance
Fortune: SEC issues subpoenas regarding dealings with EF
- EF removed warrant canary from website in Feb 26 commit: “received a voluntary enquiry from a state authority that included a requirement for confidentiality”
SEC sanctioned for bad faith conduct in DEBT Box case
Genesis $21M settlement with SEC for charges of unregistered offer & sale of securities

General

Polygon PoS added secp256r1 curve precompile (RIP7212)
GoFetch: side channel attack using data memory-dependent prefetchers in Apple silicon

END OF SERVICE: plan to deprecate Week in Ethereum News

(new/changes in bold)

Sign up to receive this newsletter weekly