Eth News and Links
Eth1
- Latest core devs call. Beiko’s notes: Berlin testnet coming soon, Ice Age delay probably goes in the next 1559 fork.
- Criteria for Turbogeth beta release: usable for mining, simplify block header/body downloading, Clique/POA switching, switching from LMDB database to MDBX
- Latest Turbogeth weekly release adds
debug_traceCall - Gas cost estimates of EVM384
- Why 1559? Better UX, better economics, better security.
- Beiko’s state of 1559 update
- Alex Stokes: 1559 is good for miners
Eth2
- Danny Ryan’s state of Eth2 in Jan 2021: eth2 is Eth’s future consensus layer, next up is either turning off PoW or sharded data for rollups
- Latest Lighthouse update: in-depth discussion of sharded data or turning off PoW. Leans toward turning off PoW with (an obviously tentative) goal of shipping in 12 months.
- Prysm’s short-term work: more performant slasher and production ready UI
- Nimbus Grafana dashboard challenge (prizes up to $5k)
- Supranational’s blst library first public release, fast sigs for BLS12-381
Layer2
- Fast withdrawals to mainnet on Loopring’s zk rollup
- Celer has 1 million users on its state channel games
- DeFi Pooling from StarkWare, a yearn-style vault on layer2 to save gas
This newsletter is made possible thanks to Trail of Bits!
Rajeev G, a security engineer with the Status project, has started providing audit report breakdowns for the benefit of less security-savvy users. His first report breakdown covers the Trail of Bits report for the Origin Dollar, which was launched without a security review and then exploited before the scheduled audit was completed. One takeaway: 7 security issues, including 3 of the highest severity, could have been found automatically with Slither.
Stuff for developers
- web3js v1.3.3 – fix Metamask provider change
- Fe v0.1 alpha release python-like language
- Truffle-token-test-utils token transfer viz
- SMTChecker and the synthesis of external functions, coming in next Solidity release
- A dev’s intro to Ethereum, part 2
Security/incidents
- Livepeer finds and patches logic bug
- Secureum’s guide to reading audits
Ecosystem
- Josh Stark: Year in Ethereum 2020
- ENS’s DNS Namespace integration is live on testnet. Use your .com domain as your ENS name.
Application layer
- Gasless NFT minting with Mintable
- Enzyme (eg, Melon v2) live. 150 assets, lending enabled, provide liquidity, synthetics. v1 UI stays live for 3 months.
- Metastable SAVE v2 is live, with tokenized stablecoin LPs
- Saddle is live, a Curve fork aimed at BTC on Ethereum using virtual synths
- In the tokenized BTC realm, BadgerDAO does BTC yieldfarming and this week launched a rebase BTC game called Digg
- Charm options is live. No oracles, 100k cap per market right now
- ArmorFinance is live: buy Nexus Mutual coverage without having to doxx yourself (KYC), plus token rewards for users
- We’re over $25b total value locked per DefiPulse
Regulation/business/tokens
- Defi will eat corporate debt
- Coindesk: ETH to 2k
- Fundstrat issues $10.5k price target for ETH
- Coinbase buys BisonTrails
- Chainalysis says the only crime on blockchains is payments for ransomware and darknet markets. Disproportionately on Bitcoin, of course
General
- MyCrypto’s review of 2020’s major blockchain security incidents
- Billy Rennekamp on the future (and unbundling?) of crypto wallets
- Brave adds IPFS support with go-ipfs running a local node
- Qin, Zhou, Gervais paper: Quantifying miner extractable value
- Werner, Perez, et al, paper: DeFi Systemization of Knowledge
Job Listings
- MetaMask is hiring engineers for a variety of positions. Apply here.
- Trail of Bits is looking for a technical editor/writer & security engineer
- 0x looking for devs of all types and a data analyst
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
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Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-jan-24-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
- Jan 27 – ETH JSON RPC API Standard call
- Feb 5 – Nimbus Grafana challenge submissions deadline (prizes up to $5k)
- Feb 5-12 – EthDenver (virtual)
- Feb 8 – CME launches ETH futures
- Mar 5 – Financial Cryptography DeFi academic workshop
- Apr 6-8 – EthCC4 (Paris)
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