Week in Ethereum News February 3, 2024

Dencun (Cancun + Deneb) upgrade (meta EIP7569)

Latest all core devs – execution (ACDE) call video. Recap by Tim Beiko. Notes from Tim Beiko and Christine Kim:
- Mainnet: Dencun upgrade date to be set on ACDC next week; assumes no issues with Holešky testnet upgrade, Goerli blob expiry & churn limit testing and Devnet 12 blob spamming
- Sepolia testnet: uneventfully upgraded to Dencun, blobs are flowing
- Prague upgrade: Discussions on including EOF or EIP4444 (bound historical data) and how Portal network could distribute historical data; scope to be finalized on ACDE in two weeks
- Osaka upgrade: Verkle agreed as core feature; Verkle overview & current status: ~2 weeks to build Verkle tree prior to upgrade & execution 10% slower

Osaka upgrade (meta EIP7607)

Centralization watch: threatening the value of your ETH

🚨 Lido at 31.82% is far too close to 33.3% threshold
Client diversity (via clientdiversity.org):
- Execution layer: Geth 78% supermajority, could cause a chain split
- Consensus layer: Prysm 39%, any client bug over 33.3% could mean loss of finality
- Research starting for validators to provide client info privately
Better geographic diversity is optimal, particularly outside of North America & Europe

Research

Unconditional inclusion lists (for censorship resistance): transactions are included in a first or second slot, otherwise they are unconditionally added in order to the bottom of the second slot

Client releases

Consensus layer:
- Lodestar v1.15.0: fixes for Deneb upgrade, js-libp2p updated to v1 and minor fixes for UX & performance improvements
- Nimbus v24.2.0: stability improvements for Deneb
- Prysm v4.2.1: older CPUs without AVX support will have failures on testnets
Execution layer:
- Erigon v2.57.2: fix for RpcDaemon seeing recently retired blocks

The Biden administration is attempting to criminalize open source software development as part of its war on crypto.

Layer 2

Arbitrum One ArbOS v11 live, adds Shanghai support (including PUSH0)
Optimism bicameral governance for upgrades, citizens house can veto [Andrew is a badgeholder]
RollCall (L2 standards) fee markets breakout call and notes; repricing EVM operations, L1 passthrough fees & potential multi-dimensional pricing

EIPs/Standards

EIPs:
- EIP7605: Homogeneous validator penalty
- Meta EIP7607: Hardfork Meta – Osaka
- EIP7609: Decrease TLOAD/TSTORE pricing
- EIP7610: Revert creation in case of non-empty storage
ERCs (application layer):
- ERC7604: ERC1155 permit approvals
- ERC7606: Transaction risk monitoring
- ERC7611: Sovereign bridged NFTs

Stuff for developers

Remix v0.42: Solidity v0.8.24 now default and GPT help for Circom compiler errors
GasliteVest: continuous linear token vesting base contract
Soledge (Solidity): convert numbers to strings, transient storage helper & reentrancy guard
ERC4626 Vault exchange rate manipulation & mitigations
Natspec smells: identify missing or incomplete natspec
Brownie v1.20.0 (Python): no longer actively maintained
Napalm: productivity framework for custom Solidity vulnerability detectors
Farcaster Frames: mini apps in posts using an image & buttons to trigger callbacks
- Frame verifier (Solidity): encode/verify MessageData structs containing Frame actions
- OnchainKit FrameKit (TypeScript): get Frame HTML, message and metadata
mesc v0.2: configure & manage RPC endpoints
Secureum RACE #26: 8 question Solidity quiz & solutions

Security

ERC1271 (signature validation for contracts) replay disclosure, possible when the signed digest doesn’t include the smart account address
Abracadabra’s Magic Internet Money $6.5M exploit via rounding error

Enterprise

Job listings: $600 for 4 issues (75 char limit). Pay using 3cities. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail

Onchain stats

Gas fees (via ultrasound.money): 6.4 to 152.8 gwei, with 19.7 gwei average
- Zero net issuance currently at 22.0 gwei
- 1.8k ETH net issuance this week
ETHUSD: $2,243 – $2,380, currently $2,307
ETHBTC: currently 0.053 (Flippening at ~0.16)

Notable at app layer

ENS gasless DNSSEC live, configure DNS names that support DNSSEC to work with ENS
Chipped: NFC press-on nails, create offchain friends list using Disco secured by your private key, pre-order
Superstate short duration US government securities fund (USTB), US qualified purchasers only
Horswap: Uniswap frontend without censorship or interface fees

Regulation/business/tokens

General

Vitalik: crypto + AI and turning 30
ETH recovered from Ledger Nano S (Firmware v1.2) with no seed phrase
Cloudflare November security incident, via a token & credentials from Okta compromise that hadn’t been rotated

(new/changes in bold)

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