Eth News and Links
Eth1
- So far, Instanbul has successfully forked. Here’s what is in the Istanbul upgrade and the Jan 6 delay of the difficulty increase.
 - The attention grabber is that Istanbul enables the layer2 rollup solutions that will reach ~3000 transactions per second
 - Red Queens, a new sync proposal
 - Geth v1.9.9 enables the Jan 6 (block 9.2m) delay of the difficulty increase
 - Parity v2.5.11 stable and v2.6.6 beta, an emergency pre-Istanbul release to include EIP1344 in the mainnet config file
 - Trinity v0.1 alpha31 emergency pre-Istanbul bugfix release
 
Eth2
- Multi-client testnet: Parity’s Shasper joins Prysmatic’s public testnet
 - Etherscan launched its eth2 block explorer
 - Latest what’s new in Eth2.
 - Danny Ryan’s Eth2 update
 - Latest implementers call. Notes from Ben and notes from Mamy
 - Prysmatic’s client update.
 - Nethermind is now working on an eth2 client to add to its eth1 client.
 - The first networking call was this week. Notes from Ben and Mamy.
 - HoneyBadgerMPC for proof of custody
 - Open questions on state providers
 - Moving ETH between shards
 - Latest Eth2 light client call
 - Inaugural edition of a monthly phase 2 call. Not recorded, but notes are here
 
Layer2 – begun, the rollup wars have
- ZK Sync, all about Matter Labs’ ZK rollup. including a testnet with a live demo.
 - Advantages of validity proofs vs fraud proofs, or why Starkware prefers ZK rollup to optimistic
 - IDEX demo of their optimistic rollup
 
Stuff for developers
- Blazing fast contracts testing from Open Zeppelin
 - JavaScript compiler/runtime for AirAssembly, a low level language for STARKs
 - Comprehensive overview of Eth development best practices
 - Getting deep into the EVM
 - Close the trust gap in signing transactions, part 2
 - Why you should use EIP1167 proxies, with tutorial
 - Austin Griffith’s latest eth.build
 - Dennison Bertram converts a WebFlow template to web3 app in seconds
 - 3Box’s edit profile plugin, a React dropin component
 - Tornado.cash is having a relayer contest on Kovan testnet
 - Next year Wyre will make it easy via meta transactions for app users to use DeFi from their debit card
 - A step by step guide to mutation testing your Eth code
 - MythX’s pro features
 - An imitation learning fuzzer for your Eth contracts from the ETH Zurich folks
 
Ecosystem
- Updates from the myriad of teams supported by the EF
 - Vitalik recounts the Shanghai attacks response
 - 30 days of Eth community shipping, November edition
 - Fixing Whisper with Waku
 
Enterprise
- EY Nightfall update – batching lowers mainnet cost of zk-enabled privacy to ~25 cents.
 - ConsenSys and Harry Fox Agency contracted for a modernized American music copyright database to distribute royalties.
 - Hyperledger Besu v1.3.6 – ready for next month’s fork to delay the difficulty increase
 - Quorum v2.4
 
Governance and standards
- ERC2426: encryption for eth2 wallet/keystore
 - EIP2427: BLOCKHASH2 opcode
 - ERC2429: Secret multisig recovery
 
Application layer
- 0x v3 is live on mainnet with ZRX staking and liquidity bridges
 - Loopring v3 also live on mainnet
 - Uniswap’s frontend banned 10 OFAC countries, but there are always decentralized frontends on IPFS
 - Betting on DeFi interest rates with Maple
 - ETHBTC relative strength index set launches
 - Net spread on Maker’s Dai is 0. 4% Dai Savings Rate and 4% Dai Stability Fee.
 - DAI flipped SAI. There’s now more Dai in existence than Sai. Probably because of that 0% spread.
 - Brave at 10.4m monthly active users, doubling in a year.
 
Tokens / Business / Regulation
- A list of government using or experimenting with blockchain
 - Liquidity pool distribution as measure of DeFi decentralization
 - GridPlus electricity customers can now pay their monthly bill with the GRID token.
 - LawCoin is tokenizing litigation funding
 - de la Rouviere: a survey of generative art economies
 - Microsoft Azure releases its Heroes NFTs (built on Enjin) to reward its contributors 
 
General
- MyCryptoWinter: an advent-style calendar of crypto security tips
 - A side chains vs state channels explainer
 - Eth101: how are transactions included in a block?
 - Automating Attack Discovery on Blockchain Incentive Mechanisms with Deep Reinforcement Learning
 - Quadratic funding as public good preference aggregator
 
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):
- Jan 1 – Augur v1 cutoff
 - Jan 1-30 – EthIndia online hackathon
 - Jan 6-20 – Gitcoin take back the web online hackathon
 - Jan ~6 – Hard fork to fix the difficulty bomb
 - Jan 31 – deadline for EU ledger 200k euro grants for blockchain startups
 - Feb 14-16 – ETHDenver
 - Mar 3-5 – EthCC (Paris)
 - Mar 29-Apr4 – EthLagos
 - Apr 3-7 – Edcon (Vienna)
 
If you appreciate this newsletter, thank ConsenSys
This newsletter is made possible by ConsenSys.
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