Eth News and Links
Mainnet execution layer
- Latest core devs call video. Notes from Tim Beiko:
- Kiln public testnet next week
- JSON RPC discussion if safe head or latest block should be default
- Shanghai upgrade priorities are withdrawals, lower rollup fees, agreed EVM improvements and quick wins
- Shanghai candidates: EIP4863 push withdrawals, EIP4844: shard blob transactions & EIP3651: warm COINBASE
- Not including in Shanghai EIP3978: gas refunds on reverts
- Name for Execution Layer PoW switch off to be decided next week
- Blocks per week indicate when the difficulty bomb explodes
Proof of Stake consensus layer
- Consensus specs v1.1.10: random renamed to prev_randao, light client patches & ignores attestations voting for wrong finalized checkpoint
- Teku v22.3.0: beacon chain explorer metrics & removes Pyrmont support
- Ben Edgington’s Upgrading Ethereum book chapter on hash tree roots & merkleization
- Benchmarking staking clients versus multi-client Vouch validator, which is considered best practice for staking services
- Nimbus on their Insecura attack: understanding how weak subjectivity can be exploited via checkpoint sync & options for strengthening the defenses
PoW switch off
- merge-devnet-5 launched, Kiln v2 public testnet now launching next week
- Join devnet-5 using Lodestar and Geth/Nethermind with one command
EIPs/Standards
Layer2
- Optimism to reduce fees by 30-40% with calldata batch compression at end of March using zlib, longer term plan to use zstd with a dictionary
- Pathfinder v0.1.0: StarkNet full node in Rust, alpha
- Arbitrum AnyTrust chains announced, ultra low cost transactions, hash of data posted on mainnet, operated by committee, assumes minimal members honest as can fallback to rollup. Similar trust assumptions to Validium
- Polynya: historical storage as the final bottleneck, state growth will be solved by statelessness, validity proofs, state expiry and PBS
This newsletter is made possible thanks to Celer!
Celer (new website launched!) is a multi-chain operating system that allows the various application logic, liquidity and states, normally segregated across different chains, to communicate with one another and enables seamless inter-chain composability for dApp developers and projects.
Developers can build inter-chain-native dApps using the Celer Inter-chain Message SDK with efficient liquidity utilization, coherent application logic, and shared states.
Users of Celer-enabled dApps, such as the cBridge asset bridge, can enjoy the benefits of a diverse multi-blockchain ecosystem with the simplicity of a single-transaction UX from a single chain.
Stuff for developers
- Hardhat v2.9.0: faster mainnet forking, parallel testing with Mocha, parallel contract compilation & large block mining for Hardhat Network
- How 3D interactive on-chain NFT was built using gITF (Graphics Language Transmission Format)
- EVM walk through of opcodes using a simple storage contract
- Guide on using Arbitrum Address registry to reduce calldata
- TrueBlocks beta: ENS support, docker version, OpenAPI based server, monitoring, index any EVM & share on IPFS and Unchained Index
- Eth Testing: generate mock Web3 Provider to simulate blockchain interaction in tests, alpha
- starknet-scaffold: template using Nile and pytest
- Rails tutorial to authenticate users with MetaMask
- Optimizing Echidna fuzzer: profiling the Haskell code found bottlenecks
Security
- Treasure NFT marketplace exploit, listed NFTs bought for free due to missing check for non-zero quantity
- Sherlock CTF exploitable contracts: created by 32 Secureum participants
Ecosystem
- Vitalik: encapsulated vs systemic complexity in protocol design
- Ethereum Foundation academic grants available to fund formal research
- MetaMask gas UI improvements for EIP1559, opt in
- Sign-In with Ethereum: unify apps with common messaging & interface
Enterprise
- Harvard Business Review: how brands should use NFTs
- KPMG Canada buys World of Women NFT
Application layer
- 0x Protocol v4 NFT swap support live on mainnet
- Yield Protocol live on Arbitrum
- Yearn entities demerging to operate independently
- Ribbon Finance veRBN (Curve style tokenomics) live
- ApeX Protocol (derivatives trading) beta live on Arbitrum
- Cryptex Finance TCAP (total crypto market cap token) beta live on Optimism
- Stratos (NFT marketplace) live on Arbitrum, by Quixotic team
- Always Never Yours project, music NFT by Jonathan Mann, experiment with Harberger taxes
Job Listings
- Mark Cuban seeks a web3 front-end developer. Send a work sample to apply.
- Lead blockchain engineer / architect for a social video platform
- EF research hiring Networking Engineer
- Nomic Foundation hiring Rust Tech Lead & Ethereum Tech Lead
- Senior Technical Writer to take ownership & completely redo the Geth docs
- Roles at Gnosis Sr DevRel Eng. Sr Production/Reliability Eng. DevOps Eng.
Reach developers experienced with Ethereum. $600 for four issues (~75 character limit), payable in ETH/DAI/USDC to abcoathup.eth on mainnet, Arbitrum or Optimism. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail
Regulation/business/tokens
- Ukraine accepting crypto donations, announces & then cancels airdrop for donators, plans for NFTs instead; over $36 million donated
- Infura & OpenSea block users in listed jurisdictions to comply with US sanctions; MetaMask can be used with your own node or any RPC endpoint but uses Infura by default
- US Treasury risk assessments for money laundering & terrorist financing, crypto use is in the minority compared with fiat, though expected to increase
- BitConnect founder indicted in US for $2.4 billion Ponzi, still at large
- MakerDAO decentralized workforce explainer
- Norswap’s economic analysis of Olympus DAO
- Musings on operating DAOs: reinvest treasury, require conflict reporting, accountable committee leaders, high bar for contributors, triage governance ideas, give signal to token holders and assume politics
- Hardening Nouns treasury against threats: recommends implementing dynamic quorum & dynamic penalty
General
- Majority of ConsenSys shareholders request audit to investigate alleged irregularities
- BBC News available via Tor in English, Russian & Ukrainian
- ecGFp5: specialized elliptic curve
- Security analysis of elliptic curves over sextic extension of small prime fields
- Skiff Workspaces: end-to-end encrypted competitor to Google Docs
Follow @WeekinEthNews to find out what the most clicked links are. Follow @evan_van_ness and @abcoathup 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-5-2022
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
- Mar 9-24 – Gitcoin Grants Round 13 (support Week in Eth News)
- Mar 10 – Foundry Seminar
- Mar 11 – Execution Layer upgrade naming for PoW switch off
- Mar 11-20 – Ethereum Rio
- Mar 15 – Cryptocurrency Class starts (virtual)
- Mar 16 – submission deadline for Underhanded Solidity Contest
- Mar 17-18 – ETH Austin summit
- Mar 29-31 – ETHDubai
- Apr 7-9 – ETH Portland hackathon
- Apr 18-25 – Devconnect (Amsterdam)
- Apr 22 – deadline for EF academic grants round
- Apr 22-24 – ETHAmsterdam
- May 3-8 – spaghettETH (Milan)
- May 20 – US Fed CBDC discussion paper feedback deadline
- Jun 10-12 – ETHPrague
- Jun 20-23 – NFT.NYC
- Jun 24-26 – ETHNewYork
- Jul 8 – ETH Seattle summit
- Jul 19-21 – EthCC 5 (Paris)
- Aug 19-21 – ETHMexicoCity
- Aug 27-28 – DeFi Security Summit (Stanford)
- Aug 29-31 – Science of Blockchain Conference (Stanford)
- Sep 12-14 – DappCon (Berlin)
- Oct 11-14 – Devcon 6 (Bogotá)
- Nov 4-6 – ETHSanFrancisco
- Dec 2-4 – ETHTaipei
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