Eth News and Links
Eth1
- Latest core devs call. Beiko’s notes: ephemeral yolov3 testnet launched, Berlin testnet tentatively Feb 24, aiming at Berlin fork in late q1/early q2, eth/66 discussion, EVM384/precompile discussion
- A call for devs interested in light clients and stateless Ethereum
Eth2
- Workshop video for merging mainnet with proof of stake as well as data shards
- Afri benchmarks the eth2 clients. Headline: “I would consider all of them production-ready”
- Staked got slashed from running redundancies. Never run two machines with same staking key and never disable slashing protection!
- Spectroscope: eth2 node monitoring tool
This newsletter is made possible thanks to Chainlink!

Chainlink Labs is hiring! Explore our open roles and come join us in accelerating the adoption of Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network and universally connected smart contracts.
Stuff for developers
- OpenZeppelin Contracts v3.4: erc777 security fix, virtual view functions, erc20 permit, beacon proxy, minimal proxy
- Latest Truffle releases add lots of Vyper support/features
- Vertigo v1.3, mutation testing framework now works with Hardhat
- Latest vscode solidity adds “import” autocomplete support
- App storage pattern for state variables in Solidity
- Austin Griffith’s flash loans intro
Security/incidents
- yearn got hacked via flashloans depegging oracle for 11m DAI, yearn stopped it while in progress and saved ~70% of the DAI. Some safeguard shields had been lowered to encourage moving to v2. A walkthrough of the attack
- Dedaub finds a DeFlast vulnerability by decompiling the closed source code and finding it lacked safeguards
- Artifact minting exploit via randomness in Dark Forest game
- Petty: what is a security audit and how should you prep for it?
- Writing your code properties with Scribble
- ArmorFi massive bug bounty pays off as Alexander Schlindwein found a vulnerability and got a (mostly vested) 7 figure payout
- Echidna v1.6.1, Eth code fuzzer now allows using compiler metadata to detect which contracts are deployed and performance optimizations for reverts
Ecosystem
- Ethereum crossed 1 billion transactions this week
- Gasnow.org adds historical data on gas price for the last week by hour/day
- Micah Zoltu: how Eth governance functions
- Noyes: what is MEV, how much is there, where are we now and tomorrow, and 1559 helps mitigate it
- epheph’s MEV of the week. Another example of the Flashbots tools
- Umbra stealth payments aiming to be on mainnet in a couple months
Enterprise
- In early 2022, Visa to issue a card for businesses to transact directly in USDC. I checked: ~99% of USDC is on Ethereum.
- EY and BSN partnering to deliver its Ethereum OpsChain product in China
- EEA’s dev tool survey results
- Setup a Clique POA network with Nethermind
- IBM Blockchain cut to zero. Never bet against Ethereum.
Application layer
- Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda is selling a crypto art NFT on Zora
- Gas fees are high, Uniswap still at record number of traders
- Short Bitcoin without having to short Bitcoin: short Bitcoin dominance on UMA
- Balancer v2 in next few months, currently being audited: uses less gas, customizable AMM logic, better capital efficiency. Single vault holds all assets in Balancer
- Balancer is partially reimbursing gas costs in select pools for users of its UI
- How to short using Synthetix
- Nexus Mutual can now invest the mutual’s funds
- APwine, tokenized future yield for Aave and Curve
- Long dated options: Primitive says their September dated options are longest in Defi
- ever.eth: Everest’s onchain directory of individual and entity KYC/data, where each record gets a subdomain
- autem.eth: a minimal wills and trusts app via dead man switch
Regulation/business/tokens
- Grayscale’s Ethereum valuation thesis: ETH as money, ETH as consumable commodity, ETH as interest bearing asset
- CME’s ETH futures goes live today at 6pm EST
General
- Status compares what messengers can really see. All the “private” messengers aren’t private.
- Attacking OSS using abandoned resources
- Brave at 25m MAUs, more than doubling in a year
- Chrome/Chromium 0day found. Immediately update your browser
Job Listing
- Showtime, the NFT social network, is hiring for a founding engineer
- Pocket is hiring a developer growth lead to supercharge dev adoption←apply
- Trail of Bits is looking for a technical editor/writer & security engineer
- 0x looking for devs of all types and a data analyst
- Reddit: Senior backend/Ethereum engineer
Want your job listing here? $250 per line (~75 character limit including spaces), payable in ETH (or 250 DAI or 250 USDC) to evan.ethereum.eth. Questions? thecryptonewspodcast at-gmail
If you’re wondering “why didn’t my post make it into Week in Ethereum News,” then please put it on an Ethereum subreddit; emails/DMs are not part of my workflow.
Please click the following if you’re interested in sponsoring the newsletter.
Twitter: follow @WeekinEthNews to find out what the most clicked are. Follow @evan_van_ness to get most of the week’s news in real time.
Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-feb-7-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
- Feb 7 – CME launches ETH futures
- Feb 9 – Stateless Ethereum call
- Mar 5 – Financial Cryptography DeFi academic workshop
- May 14 – papers due for WoSCA 2021
- Jul 20-22 – EthCC4 (Paris)
Did you get forwarded this newsletter? Sign up to receive it weekly