Eth News and Links
Shapella (Shanghai + Capella) upgrade
- Withdrawals are coming to mainnet on April 12 with the Shapella upgrade
- Goerli testnet successfully upgraded to Shapella, testnet finalized after validators updated their clients, withdrawals & BLS credential changes are being processed
- Latest all core devs – execution (ACDE) call video. Summary by Tim Beiko. Notes from Tim Beiko & Christine Kim:
- Mainnet Shapella upgrade scheduled, client releases expected in a week
- Discussion on EL suggesting local blocks, consider after Shapella
- Potential Cancun EIPs: SSZ minimal scope, SELFDESTRUCT removal, EVM MAX, BLS, transient storage, beacon state root in EVM, EOF, SWAPN & DUPN opcodes & PAY opcode
- Ethereum Cat Herders client diversity survey results
Dencun (Cancun + Deneb) upgrade
- KZG Ceremony:
- First general contribution period is closed, people already in the lobby get to contribute
- Special contribution period April 1-16
- consensus-specs v1.3.0-rc.4: additional Deneb test vectors
- EIP4844 fee market analysis: data price of 1 wei sets wrong expectations and incentivizes spammy use of blobs
Layer 1
- Slot finder to pick time for network upgrades (on historical roots boundary)
- Geth patched transaction pool DoS vulnerability found on Goerli testnet
- Nimbus v23.3.0 added support for running multiple execution clients
- Draft proposal to replace SELFDESTRUCT with DEACTIVATE
- Withdrawals: Coinbase expected ~24 hours after Shapella and Lido expected mid May
Client releases
- Consensus layer:
- Nimbus v23.3.1: config handling fixes, improves stability with Besu and fault tolerance when running multiple execution clients
- Execution layer:
- Nethermind v1.17.2: fixes bad block production when an empty block was scheduled
Research
- Encrypted transaction pools to address MEV & censorship
- Transaction auctions with same trust assumptions as today to give some MEV back to users
- Idea for Subgame Credible anti-MEV mechanism to retroactively penalize harms
For Stakers
- Withdrawals explainer: automated process but withdrawal key needs to be an Ethereum address, no need to rush BLS credential change unless mnemonic compromised
Layer 2
- Arbitrum One & Nova moved to on-chain DAO governance with 9 of 12 security council (for emergency updates), token airdrop next week with 12.75% for users and 1.13% for Protocol Guild & DAOs with treasuries on Arbitrum; Arbitrum Orbit announced: permissionless creation of L3s
- Aztec: sunsetting Aztec Connect to focus on their zkEVM rollup
- Patrick McCorry: defining rollups both by the community and the validating bridge
EIPs/Standards
- EIPs:
- EIP6690: EVM modular arithmetic extensions (EVM MAX) decoupled from EOF
- ERCs:
- ERC6682: NFT Flashloans
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Stuff for developers
- EVM language design: overview of Solidity, Vyper, Fe, Huff, ETK and Yul
- Calldata encoding deep dive
- Gas analysis of clones vs naive factories: only use clones for low throughput
- Function dispatcher optimization using Huff
- Ganache JSON-RPC reference, run RPC methods using Ganache in the browser
- web3.py v6: Python v3.10/11 support, AsyncHTTPProvider, safe & finalized block identifiers, improved multithreading, improved customization and CCIP Read support
- Sourcify v2: reusable lib-sourcify library to verify a contract using the source, chain & address
- BlockSec Phalcon transaction explorer adds debugging & improved transaction sharing
- Pyrometer: security tool for contract analysis, alpha
- Paradigm data portal: public datasets for contract bytecode & metadata, ETH transfers and contract slots, parquet file format
- Worldcoin: World ID protocol & SDK with phone number & privacy-preserving iris verifications
Security
- Euler Finance $197 million exploit, lack of health check in donation mechanism
- ParaSpace exploit blocked by BlockSec with 2.9k ETH rescued
- Immunefi Proof of Concept templates using Foundry: reentrancy, token balance manipulation, flash loan and price manipulation
Ecosystem
- Finematics: withdrawals explainer
- EF’s Next Billion fellowship cohort 3, applications close April 28
- Vitalik: choosing guardians for multisig & social recovery wallets
Enterprise
- NAB (Australian bank) pilots intra-bank cross border stablecoin transaction
- Microsoft Edge browser testing native crypto wallet
- Meta winding down NFT efforts for now
Application layer
- Bank run panic caused USDC to depeg outside banking hours:
- Nexus Mutual v2 live on mainnet, cover for crypto-native & real world risks, cover as NFTs
- Sismo zkConnect: private single sign-on, beta
- Stealcam: NFT photos only the holder can view, pixelated for everyone else, live on Arbitrum
- POAP Drops: streamlined creation, view past drops and manage existing POAPs
- DAO Drops (retroactive public goods funding): allocate $250k DAI from EF grant. Voting power given to contract deployers, POAP collectors and DAO voters. Vote by March 24
Job Listings
- Nimbus is hiring a Site Reliability Engineer
- Frax Finance is expanding their official core developer team. Apply here!
- L2BEAT 💗 is hiring a Senior Software Engineer & Product Owner. Apply here!
- Immutable is hiring a Principal Product Security Engineer
Job listings: $600 for four issues (75 character limit), payable in ETH/DAI/USDC to abcoathup.eth on mainnet or Layer 2. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail
Regulation/business/tokens
- FDIC fully protected deposits at SVB & Signature Bank, which helped restabilize USDC
- US Fed denies Caitlin Long’s Custodia Bank membership application (custodial only, no fractional reserves)
- Blockchain Association collecting evidence of crypto debanking
- Data visualization on implied versus realized volatility in crypto options [Starbloom portfolio]
- Mint first: creators should mint content as NFTs and then amplify on social media
General/crypto
- PeopleDAO 76 ETH social engineering exploit, payment added to Google sheet shared in Discord
- Semacaulk: zk set membership protocol, reduces insert gas from 1M to 68k (using KZG commitments instead of Merkle trees), proof of concept
- CASPER: secret channel attack via computer’s internal speaker to a mobile phone at 20bits/sec
- Vespass: password manager, uses secret sharing & hardware enclaves, no master password
Follow @WeekinEthNews to find out what the most clicked links are. Follow @abcoathup and @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-march-18-2023
Upcoming Dates of Note
(new/changes in bold)
- Mar 21 – deadline for Summer of Protocols
- Mar 24 – deadline to vote for DAO drops
- Mar 28-30 – Ethereum Rio
- Mar 31 – Apr 2 – ETHSamba (Rio) hackathon & conference
- Mar 31 – deadline for EF account abstraction grants round
- Apr 5-8 – ETH Beijing hackathon
- Apr 12 – Mainnet upgrades to Shapella
- Apr 12-14 – NFT NYC
- Apr 13-16 – Pragma Tokyo & ETHGlobal Tokyo hackathon
- Apr 14-16 – EthereumZuri.ch conference & hackathon
- Apr 21-25 – EthTaipei hackathon & conference
- Apr 27-30 – Istanbul ETH Privacy conference & hackathon
- Apr 28 – deadline for EF’s Next Billion fellowship cohort 3
- May 5-10 – ETHTallinn hackathon & NFT Tallinn conference
- May 9-12 – EY blockchain summit
- May 12-14 – ETHGlobal Lisbon
- May 19-23 – EDCON Montenegro (changed from Vienna)
- May 20-21 – ETHDam (Amsterdam) conference & hackathon
- May 24-26 – Spaghett ETH (Naples) conference
- May 26-28 – ETHDublin hackathon
- Jun 2-4 – ETH Seoul
- Jun 2-6 – ETH Belgrade conference & hackathon
- Jun 9-11 – ETHPrague conference & hackathon
- Jun 23–25 – ETHGlobal Waterloo (changed from Toronto)
- Jul 5-7 – ETHBarcelona
- Jul 17-20 – EthCC (Paris)
- Jul 21–23 – ETHGlobal Paris
- Aug 16-19 – Ethereum Argentina (Buenos Aires)
- Aug 30 – Sep 3 – ETHWarsaw conference & hackathon
- Sep 1-3 – Ethcon Korea hackathon
- Sep 10-12 – Ethereum Singapore hackathon & conference
- Sep 11-13 – DappCon (Berlin)
- Sep 15 – Protocol Berg (Berlin)
- Sep 22–24 – ETHGlobal New York
- Oct 6–25 – ETHOnline (ETHGlobal) virtual
- Oct 28–30 – ETH Lisbon hackathon
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