Week in Ethereum News




Week in Ethereum News
December 11, 2021

Eth News and Links

Mainnet execution layer

  • Arrow Glacier upgrade pushing back the difficulty bomb was successful
  • Latest core devs call video. Notes from Tim Beiko:
    • PoW switch off key tasks: optimistic sync, fork choice rules for competing terminal PoW blocks, authentication between execution & consensus layers and lots of testing
    • EIP4488 (call data gas price reduction) will not be done before PoW switch off
    • Post PoW proposals need to be prioritized with community input, e.g. withdrawals vs sharding/EIP4488
  • Besu v21.10.3: log4j zero-day vulnerability, update immediately or manually mitigate
  • Piper Merriam’s Aperture Portal Network update: changing focus from State network to Chain History network 

EIPs/Standards

  • EIP4515: XTNDR opcode family
  • EIP4520: Multi-byte opcodes prefixed by EB and EC
  • EIP4524: Safer ERC20
  • EIP4527: QR Code data transmission protocol for the Ethereum wallets

Proof of Stake consensus layer

  • Guide to join PoW switch off devnet-3
  • Teku security update (v21.12.1): log4j zero-day vulnerability, Teku not believed to be vulnerable but update immediately or manually mitigate
  • Nimbus v1.5.5: optimizations, 6x epoch processing & 2x Altair block processing
  • Lodestar consensus light-client demo: tracks the head trustlessly, sync to head is 25KB/day of data, follow head is 81KB/day
  • Light nodes can offer similar security guarantees as full nodes if enough people run full and light nodes, need to make them easy to run on consumer hardware

Layer2

  • Mir team joins Polygon to build Polygon Zero zk-rollup, pivot from Layer 1 to an Ethereum Layer 2
  • Aztec Connect: private bridge live on testnet, aggregates like transactions from Aztec users to interact with Layer 1 DeFi
  • Proto’s EVM equivalence endgame is Yellow-Paper equivalence
  • dYdX state explorer to be built by L2BEAT, showing decoded calldata on Layer 1 and allow forced exits & trades by sending a Layer 1 transaction
  • L2BEAT: how to monitor that $6 billion locked in Layer 2 is secure
  • Polynya’s rollup fees explainer: why they get cheaper to use as Layer 2 adoption increases

This newsletter is made possible thanks to Celer Network!

Celer

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cBridge has done almost $1.5b in volume moving ETH, USDT, and USDC between Ethereum mainnet, Optimism, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Boba, Fantom, BSC and Polygon.

LIQUIDITY MINING launches December 15th for $ETH, $USDT and $USDC, with rewards paid in $CELR 

Stuff for developers

  • Solidity prototype of user-defined operators on user-defined types
  • Ethers.js update: ENS avatars in v5; v6 assumes ES2016, TypeScript changes, uses new crypto libraries, dynamic & typed Contract methods, Network object makes Layer 2 providers easier to create & use
  • Foundry: fast testing framework for tests written in Solidity, Rust reimplementation of dapptools
  • kryptology: Coinbase cryptographic library, Apache-2.0 license
  • Slither v0.8.2: Solidity v0.8 feature support (custom errors, top level functions, immutable variables) and detectors for in loop delegatecall & msg.value
  • truffle-plugin-verify v0.5.20: verifies proxy implementation on Etherscan and flags as a proxy
  • Argent X: browser extension StarkNet wallet, currently ~4 minutes to deploy on Goerli, ~2 hours on mainnet
  • Tenderly adds Arbitrum support
  • Batch data retrieval using GraphQL on Geth
  • Dodoc: documentation generation from Solidity, zero-config Hardhat plugin

Security

  • BadgerDAO’s $121 million exploit post mortem, Cloudflare Workers script deployed using compromised API key, intermittently phished ERC20 token approvals
  • dYdX deposit proxy post mortem, contract had user ERC20 approvals and could make arbitrary calls, $200k stolen, $500k bug bounty paid

Ecosystem

  • Vitalik’s scalable blockchain endgame: block production may become centralized due to network effects within rollups or cross-domain MEV, but with decentralized validation and anti-censorship protection
  • Flashbots Protect RPC v0.4.0: adds free transaction cancellations
  • Josh Stark’s draft guide to joining the Ethereum ecosystem [Google doc], to be sent to 1000+ applicants for EF internship, contributions welcome

Enterprise

Application layer

  • Messari Governor: governance aggregator, supports Snapshot, Governor Alpha & Bravo
  • Coinbase offers yield on Dai using Compound, covers gas fees, available in 70 countries (excludes US)
  • Pods on-chain options protocol live on Arbitrum
  • Enso Finance vampire attack of index projects
  • xToken lending protocol live on Arbitrum
  • dHEDGE decentralized hedge funds live on Optimism
  • WAVEFORM 1/1 music NFT produced by 3LAU with full master recording & publishing rights
  • Sound: limited edition song NFTs
  • Unlock NFTs as memberships live on Optimism
  • WorthInNFT: value of NFT assets for an address, supports ENS
  • Inb0x: address to address messaging with end to end encryption

Job Listings

Reach developers experienced with Ethereum.  DECEMBER SPECIAL: $200 for two issues (~75 character limit), payable in ETH/DAI/USDC to abcoathup.eth.  Questions? abcoathup at-gmail

Regulation/business/tokens

General

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.

Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-december-11-2021

Dates of Note

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