Week in Ethereum News July 20, 2024

EOF remains in Pectra for now, Virgil Griffith sentence reduced, spot ETH ETFs launch July 23 in US and WazirX (Indian exchange) $230M exploit

All core devs

Osaka + F starname upgrade

Verkle implementers call #21: proposal to reduce witness size, updates to EIP6800 & EIP2935 and cost of code chunking

Centralization watch: threatening the value of your ETH

🚨 Lido at 29.15%, still too close to 33.3% threshold
Client diversity (via clientdiversity.org):
- Execution layer: Geth ~55% majority
- Consensus layer: Prysm 35%
- Any client bug over 33.3% could mean loss of finality
- Potuz: stress of potential consensus bugs on majority client developers
Better geographic diversity is optimal, particularly outside of North America & Europe

Layer 1

Blocknative: data viz of self-built blocks, unintentionally increase base fee volatility
EIP7732 ePBS:
- ePBS breakout #5: short call, proposer IP leaks requesting headers from builder and consensus spec tests fixes in progress
Nethermind EVMYulLean: EVM + Yul specification, executable, in Lean

Research

Anders Elowsson: sealed execution auction, Vickrey slot auction of execution proposal rights, attesters supervise commit/reveal scheme facilitated by builders & beacon proposer
Multi-round MEV-Boost: mitigate negatives of based preconfs & retain benefits of based rollups

Client Releases

Consensus layer:
- Lodestar v1.20.2: patch for publishing blinded blocks using Lodestar beacon node & Lighthouse/Nimbus validator client with MEV-Boost
Execution layer:
- Reth v1.0.3: fix for Base mainnet & async Backfill stream

Layer 2

Scroll delayed finalization to investigate potential ecosystem incident, confirmed Rho Markets was application specific
L2BEAT Badges: visual display of L2 features

EIPs/Standards

EIPs (Ethereum improvement proposals):
- EIP7745: Two dimensional log filter data structure
ERCs (application layer standards):
- ERC7743: Multi-owner non-fungible tokens (MO-NFT)
- ERC7744: Code index (index contract bytecode)
- ERC7746: Composable security middleware hooks
EIP.tools adds RIPs (rollup improvement proposals)

Stuff for developers

Solidity via-IR compilation pipeline explainer: translates Solidity into Yul (intermediate representation) for optimization rather than direct to bytecode, plan to make default with EOF
Solidity hidden overflow: math expression types cast to highest type used by variables
Solady (Solidity snippets): adds ERC1967 minimal proxies with immutable args, auto verified on Etherscan
Z0r0z sstore3, read/write contract storage using balance & address, license: AGPL v3
Rindexer, EVM indexing tool in Rust, beta
Reth Execution Extension (ExEx) examples
Echidna v2.2.4: improves fuzzing speed & user experience, adds support for transient opcodes
Audit Wizard adds Cyfrin Aderyn (Solidity static analyzer)
Spice (Python): export data from Dune API
CTFs:
- Damn Vulnerable DeFi v4: migrated to Foundry, new challenges: curvy puppet, shards, withdrawal & rewarder

Security

WazirX (Indian exchange) $230M exploit via multisig compromise
LiFi $11.6M exploit on mainnet & Arbitrum via arbitrary call, after contract facet added, infinite approvals impacted
Minterest $1.4M exploit on Mantle L2 via reentrancy
Security Alliance (SEAL): incident response to Squarespace domain compromise

Ecosystem

Enterprise

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

Onchain stats

Fees (via ultrasound.money):
- Gas: 0.9 to 41.7 gwei, 6.8 gwei average; zero net issuance at 23.6 gwei
- 13k ETH net issuance this week
ETHUSD: $3,121 – $3,538, currently $3,488, all time high $4,878
ETHBTC: currently 0.053 (Flippening at ~0.164)

Regulation/business/tokens

General

END OF SERVICE: plan to deprecate Week in Ethereum News

(new/changes in bold)

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