Week in Ethereum News April 26, 2021

Eth News and Links

Mainnet execution layer

Tim Beiko’s periodic broader overview of mainnet changes: testnets for the July/Aug London upgrade
Latest core devs call. Notes from Tim Beiko: London fork in July/Aug will be eip1559, basefee, bomb delay, and eliminating refunds
OpenEthereum postmortem for Berlin consensus bug

EIPs/Standards

ERC3440: NFT editions standard
EIP3520: transactions destination opcode
EIP3529: No SELFDESTRUCT refunds, reduce SSTORE refunds, add a max refund per transaction of 20% of gas used
EIP3521: Reduce access list cost

Proof of stake consensus layer

Our proof of stake network had its first hiccups this week. An issue with eth1data voting and validator deposits led to Prysm nodes being unable to produce blocks. This was relatively minor, leading to an average of less than a dollar of forgone attestations for individual validators.
- Prysmatic released a hotfix
Latest what’s new in eth2: it is time for everybody to take client diversity seriously. Ben reflects on the hiccups. Running the majority client puts your own money at risk, plus everyone else’s.
Turning off PoW testnet: how to setup a multi-client ethereum merge testnet. An ephemeral multi-client testnet is planned for late this upcoming week.
Nethermind floats October as an aggressive target to turn off PoW
When we turn off PoW, staking rewards will likely be multiples higher than they are now
Latest proof of stake implementation call. Notes from Alex Stokes and Ben Edgington. The first upgrade (named Altair) may get pushed back a couple weeks, roughly around the London fork upgrade.
We hit 1 million PoS blocks this week, the milestone block proposed by Validator_McValid_ETH
Visualizing Ethereum’s sharded, rollup-centric future, secured by proof of stake

Layer2

Celer’s layer2 finance is live: transfer your DAI, USDC, USDT or BUSD to Celer’s optimistic rollup and then you can deposit gas-free to Aave, Compound or Curve
StarkEx’s oracle price feed
Scalar: Connext’s state channel microtransactions powering TheGraph

This newsletter is made possible thanks to Celer!

Celer recently launched Layer2.finance on Ethereum mainnet.

Layer2.finance tackles the two biggest challenges preventing DeFi from reaching mass adoption: the extraordinarily high transaction fees and being very difficult to navigate and use. Layer2.finance is a novel solution that allows people to access all existing DeFi protocols at a fraction of the cost by acting like a “DeFi Public Transportation System”. With Celer’s advanced layer-2 rollup technology, multiple people split the cost of individual layer1DeFi transactions in a completely trust-free and non-custodial way.

Users can use Aave, Compound and Curve now completely for free via layer2.finance.

Follow Celer on twitter, blog, discord and telegram.

Stuff for developers

Solidity v0.8.4 – custom errors and an ABI decoder v2 bugfix
PRBMath – fixed point math Solidity library from Paul Berg
An Ethernal plugin for Hardhat, an easy blockchain explorer for local networks
Torus launches Face/TouchID logins
zoKrates v0.7 – SNARKs on Ethereum library. breaking release with constant generics
A prototype for VDF in Solidity
Rivet’s Bolt for transaction data with no requests per second cap
Learn SQL and ETH at the same time tutorial
Debug commands with archivenode.io and IPFS

Security

New Ethernaut level
MakerDAO discloses patched vulnerabilities in ESM and End modules
EASY (on Polygon) treasury was controlled by one EOA which got compromised
Pancake v2 bug (on BSC obviously, but in Solidity)
Samczsun: uncovering a 4 year old EToken2 bug

Ecosystem

This week, the gas limit went up to 15m, fees low got down close to 30 gwei at off-peak periods
EF supported teams R&D update: compendium of progress from EF teams
HoneybadgerSwap: MPC as a sidechain, with a Uniswap-style demo running on Kovan testnet
Messari notes that Ethereum settled $1.5m trillion worth of transactions in just q1 2021

Enterprise

Cartier, LVMH and Prada launch Aura consortium chain on Quorum

Application layer

NexusMutual launches expanded protocol cover: covers you against all protocol risks (rug pulls excepted!) even across different chains
Stock trading is live on Synthetix’s Kwenta, starting with 6 big US tech stocks, with extra yield on afterhours pools
UMA synthetic CryptoPunk index token
DeFiSaver’s Recipe Creator build transactions in English or by clicking, and you can simulate it in the UI with Tenderly
Archer swap: PoC frontend for 0 slippage fee “only execute if successful” Uniswap transactions
Uniswap breaks $10b weekly volume
Centrifuge’s real world assets live in MakerDAO with NewSilver’s real estate loans

Regulation/business/tokens

Ethereumcashflow.com: a store of value with cash flow
3 Canadian Ethereum ETFs launch
Venmo launched crypto buying and selling
Wyoming recognizes DAOs as type of LLC
Beware of NFT sleepminting: tricking frontends to make it look like artists created NFTs that they did not

General

Dexes are superior to centralized exchanges reminder: Turkish exchange Thodex founder apparently absconds with $2 billion
Bitmain says they’ll launch a new ASIC, not sure who’s buying given that we’re turning off PoW
Practical SNARK aggregation without trusted setup

Job Listings

Matter Labs is hiring engineering, operational & community roles for zkSync
Join our team to help bring Ethereum into governments as a dApp developer
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!)
Enzyme is hiring. Solidity dev, data engineer, UX/UI designer & growth eng.
90 day apprenticeships to be an auditor with Trail of Bits
Want to work on stateless/EVM? EF JavaScript team is hiring several developers

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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Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):

April 26-30 – DAO Rush Week
May 7 – Building on Ethereum with Austin Griffith and Nader Dabit
May 14 – papers due for WoSCA 2021
May 14 – Jun 2 – 0xHack
Jul 20-22 – EthCC4 (Paris)

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