Week in Ethereum News




Week in Ethereum News
August 28, 2021

Eth News and Links

Mainnet execution layer

  • Consensus bug (CVE-2021-39137) exploited causing a small chain split for those who did not update their Geth nodes as instructed:
    • Most miners had already updated and the incorrect minority chain was short-lived
    • Update now to Geth v1.10.8 and Erigon v2021.08.04 (or later)
    • Exploit explainer: pointer to contract’s memory was overwritten (pointers are confusing)
    • Impacts Geth based EVM networks (sidechains and Layer2)
  • Geth removing deprecated RPC flags, update command line flags to use http instead
  • 100,000 ETH burnt with EIP1559 since London upgrade
  • Execution layer client teams granted $1.5 million from application layer projects (Compound Grants, Lido, Synthetix, The Graph and Uniswap Grants) and Kraken, in addition to Ethereum Foundation funding

EIPs/Standards

Proof of stake consensus layer

  • Stakers: you must update to the latest Geth or Erigon if you run them. Also be prepared for the Altair upgrade coming at the end of September
  • Beacon chain minor incident:
    • Orphaned blocks caused small number of dropped attestations, resulting in a 1-2% drop in participation
    • Caused by Lido overreliance on one node serving the queries of 4000 validators
    • Data driven investigation
  • Danny Ryan’s Finalized PoS update: Altair upgrade of Prater testnet on September 2, Beacon chain upgrade targeting end of September
  • Latest What’s New in Eth2
  • PoS implementers call. Notes from Alex Stokes and Ben Edgington
  • Teku v21.8.2: Altair upgrade of Prater and reduced CPU and memory usage
  • Lighthouse v1.5.1: Altair upgrade of Prater, v1.5.0 improved networking stack and doppelganger protection, downgrade requires resync 
  • Nimbus privacy focus impacts crawlers as cycles libp2p peerid on restart and doesn’t accept socket connection when peer table is full
  • Proposal for committee-driven MEV smoothing to equally share a block’s MEV among the committee members and the proposer
  • Predicted exit/entry queue clog once withdrawals enabled due to validators wanting to compound their stake and rotate keys, these use cases should be handled without an exit/entry to avoid clogging
  • Stereum launcher: beacon chain client installer, supports 4 clients

Layer2

  • Optimism adds custom ERC20 token deposit and withdrawals
  • Nova: trustless relaying of contract calls between L2 and L1, deployed on Optimism and mainnet, restricted to approved projects for now
  • Hop enables fast exits from Optimism to mainnet for USDC and USDT, avoids 7 day optimistic rollup withdrawal time
  • Loopring zkRollup NFTs: mint, trade and transfer on L2, deposit to L2, withdraw to L1, supports ERC721 and ERC1155
  • L2Beat adds risk view: security, data availability, what can be changed and what to do on censorship or system goes offline

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Stuff for developers

Security

  • OpenZeppelin Contracts TimelockController had security vulnerability, actor with executor role could escalate privileges, projects should migrate to TimelockController in v4.3.1
  • SushiSwap paid $1 million bounty to samczsun for Miso vulnerability disclosure where $350 million was at risk and assistance with mitigation

Ecosystem

Enterprise

Application layer

Regulation/business/tokens

General

Job Listings

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Follow @WeekinEthNews to find out what the most clicked links are. Follow @evan_van_ness and @abcoathup to get most of the week’s news in real time.

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Dates of Note

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

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