Eth News and Links
Eth1
- There’s an ongoing debate as to how much Eth1 should make breaking changes. In this instance, it’s about opcode repricing which might break code deployed on the chain, even though it is a bad practice to rely on static gas pricing. Sorpaas says no breaking changes please, though that’s opposed to the original sustainability movement which got mislabeled “eth1x.” It’s not an easy debate in a decentralized ecosystem, though we have repriced opcodes before, because that’s necessary to avoid DoS attacks.
- Swende’s 1884 security considerations
- ChainSecurity’s Hubert Ritzdorf analysis of deployed code potentially affected by EIP1884
- Swende 2046 benchmarking in Geth. 2046 reduces cost of calls to precompiles
- an EVM backend for LLVM from ETC Labs Core
- evmone: fast EVM implementation in c++
- Péter Szilágyi: “we have an experimental Geth full node weighing 139GB on #Ethereum mainnet: 94GB on HDD and 45GB on SSD. It’s in sync”
- Parity v2.6.2-beta and v2.5.7-stable to fix a DoS attack of publicly exposed RPCs. Kudos to Amberdata for reporting.
Eth2
- Latest What’s New in Eth2
- Latest Eth2 implementers call. Mamy and Ben both took notes.
- Nimbus client update – working on launch mechanics and interoperability.
- Lodestar client update – BLS optimization, disc v5, and Eric Tu wrote the fastest JavaScript SHA256 implementation
- Spec v0.8.3 came out a week ago. updates to tests and networking.
- phase 1 spec has Sep 30th target date for completeness
- Some privacy proposals: Privacy-Preserving Casper FFG using Traceable Ring Signatures and ZKP to remove the mapping ip address / wallet’s public key of a validator
- EF released a list of Eth2 grants, focused on client teams and interop/networking, as well as some R&D for light clients and also for phase1 proof of custody. There are also 3 open bounties: phase 0 consensus, Legendre PRF, and STARK friendly hash
- Danny Ryan talks Eth2 on Into the Ether
- Rocketpool’s second beta to test out decentralized Eth2 staking pools
- Vitalik’s list of things that will change for app devs in Eth2. This is not short-term planning but things to keep in mind for the future.
Layer 2
- FunFair founder Jeremy Longley with a detailed walkthrough of their state channel architecture and code
- “A unified state channel specification for Ethereum” to lay “the foundation for a fully interoperable ecosystem” so that building on channels is as easy as possible for app devs
- AdEx: How we built the largest payment channel network on Ethereum. 9 million transactions with only 13k USD onchain because they trigger a payment via channel for every ad impression. 10 cents in gas paid for millions of unidirectional, one-to-many payments. A good example of programmatic micropayments made possible by state channels.
- Raiden light client v0.1
- Vitalik: the dawn of hybrid layer 2
- Optimistic rollup. Bonds/challenges to ensure valid transactions, instead of zk proofs, but easier to generalize for all applications and not just payments.
Stuff for developers
- Building holographic consensus on Aragon tutorial
- Airscript v0.5.4 – performance speedups for STARKs, approaching single thread limits
- Noble BLS12-381 pairing-friendly curve
- Truffle v5.0.34 now supports Node12
- Rapid dapp prototyping with Austin Griffith
- first Postgres extension to run WebAssembly
- EthFS, a Unix-like filesystem, check it out on testnet
- Making a Remix plugin tutorial
- Build a smart fridge with Streamr, RuuviTags, Node-RED, IBM Cloud Watson Studio tutorial
- Getting started with IPFS in Ethereum Grid
- web3.js vs ethers.js
- A code walkthrough of MolochDAO v2
- You can now view and export Etherscan’s verified source codes with a license
- Vyper v0.1 beta12. Also: a Kauri collection of articles on getting started with Vyper
Ecosystem
- How to participate in the ENS shortname auction. Starts Sep 1
- Anonymous login using SNARKs/Semaphore
- Videos from the Swarm Summit
- AZTEC’s Ignition Ceremony starts in October, you can apply now to be part of it. This multi-party computation ceremony will likely get used in many future zk implementations.
Enterprise
- Pantheon becomes Hyperledger Besu – the first public chain client in Hyperledger. “Besu” is Japanese for base.
- Pantheon v1.2.2
- EEA telecom use cases report (PDF)
- Oxfam, Sempo and ConsenSys in Vanuatu for direct transfers of humanitarian aid to citizens, rather than indirectly through leaky governments
Governance and Standards
- EIP2253: Add wallet_getAddressBook JSON-RPC method
- EIP2256: Add wallet_getOwnedTokens JSON-RPC method
- EIP2250: Gas Price Range
- EIPxxxx: Web3 Login Permissions. And MetaMask’s intro to web3 permissions
- ENS Login: open standard for wallet integration
- Mike Goldin on the state of DAOs in the TCR call
- SelloutDAO: sell your vote in any MolochDAO fork
- A proposal failed that would have given back some of the DigixDAO’s ETH, and there were lots of unhappy people
Live on mainnet
- Erasure Protocol live on mainnet with ErasureBay. “Open marketplace for information,” publish, create reputation, profit. Get griefed if wrong.
- Official Star Trek collectible ships for sale live on mainnet. These collectible tokens will later be playable in Lucid Sight’s game
Application layer
- Dharma v2 in beta, built on Compound for fixed rates with fiat on/offramps
- PoolTogether v2: auto re-entry, interest is immediate, can join or leave pool at any time
- You can play the Prisoner’s Dilemma onchain (caveat emptor)
- LSDai: tokenized interest rate swaps
- TokenSet’s 50 day moving average automated trading strategy. I think these are super cool and bought a few.
- Torque: indefinite, fixed rate loans borrowed from bZx’s Fulcrum lending pools. “Torque did not require substantial smart contract development — the tools were already there”
Tokens / Business / Regulation
- Synthetix: we were “dead wrong” in trying to develop on centralized chains like EOS because Eth network effects are real. As Robert Leshner notes, “there are now more developers building on Compound Finance than there are developers building on either EOS or Tron.”
- Another Flippening: Tether active addresses is multiples higher on Eth than on BTC
- NFTs are the “hello world!” of the internet of property
General
- Three DeFi newsletters worth tracking: Ryan Sean Adams’ Bankless, Camila Russo’s The Defiant, and Nodar Janashia’s DeFi tutorials. Moar competition.
- ETH DKG: distributed key generation from onchain code
- Vitalik: quadratic voting with sortition
- For Week in Ethereum News’ 3 year anniversary, I did an annotated version of this week’s issue. Using Unlock Protocol, you can view it by purchasing a limited edition collectible NFT for the 3rd anniversary. Proceeds will be donated to things within the Ethereum ecosystem.
🎂 3 year anniversary 🎂
Just to repeat the advertisement immediately above: you can buy the limited edition NFT for 0.11 Eth which will unlock the annotated edition.
All proceeds will be back into Ethereum somehow, likely donated to a public good, at my discretion. And who knows, maybe there will be future benefits for the 200 NFT holders?
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):
- Sep 1 – ENS 3-6 character auction starts
- Sep 2-16 – Decentraland SDK virtual hackathon (250k USD in prizes. There’s a referral code on that link that gets both you and me something extra)
- Sep 3 – Deadline to apply for EU Horizon Prize. 1m € each to 5 “Blockchains for Social Good” projects
- Sep 6-8 – ETHBoston
- Sep 10-11 – DeFi Summit (London)
- Sep 15 – Augur v1 cutoff
- Sep 15 – Ethereal Tel Aviv
- Sep 16 – Tachyon accelerator application deadline
- Sep 15-16- StarkWare sessions (Tel Aviv)
- Sep 22 – IDEO virtual hackathon ends
- Sep 27 – ErasureCon (password: information) (SF)
- Oct 7 – ENS workshop (Osaka)
- Oct 8-11 – DeVcon (Osaka) and Devcon social events calendar
- Oct 19-20 – Crosslink (Taipei)
- Nov 8-10 – ETHWaterloo
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