Eth News and Links
Mainnet execution layer
- Latest core devs call. Notes from Tim Beiko
- Decided: EIP3529 (getting rid of gas refunds) included in London fork, difficulty bomb postponed to q2 2022, including EIP3541 in London to be decided next call, also timing for London to be decided next call
- EIP3074 community call
- Idea: charge gas to access each individual contiguous 31-byte segment of code, to put a ceiling on witness size
- Updated EVM384 Geth benchmarking
EIPs/Standards
- EIP3540: Ethereum Object Format
- EIP3541: Reject new contracts starting with the 0xEF byte (a stepping stone to 3540)
- EIP3534: Restricted Chain Context Type Transactions
- ERC3525: Versatile NFT
- ERC3549: Anti-sleepminting ERC721 Metadata sig
Proof of stake consensus layer
- First ephemeral multi-client testnet to turn off PoW with 12 different client combinations; a surprising amount of consensus.
- A longer lasting testnet coming in next week or so
- Client diversity matters: switch to Lighthouse (or another minority client) for your own good and the good of the network. They have a neat feature I didn’t know about: use Teku for redundancy even if Lighthouse node has a bug.
- Reminder: we have four fantastic consensus clients: Lighthouse, Nimbus, Prysm, Teku
- Prysmatic post-mortem on last week’s staking hiccups coming from an invalid Eth deposit root hash in the cache initialization for deposits
- What would’ve happened if the staking hiccups had occurred after we turn off PoW
- Barnabé Monnot: graphical view of staking hiccup event.
- Chain never stopped finalizing, “strong evidence for the robustness of the protocol”
- A demo of Teku’s sync in a minute
- Latest turning off PoW call, notes from Shane Lightowler
- Add ability to change staking key
- Work in progress design for stakers to withdraw
- There’s now more than 4 million ETH in the staking contract
- Vitalik on some underappreciated PoS benefits: regular blocks every 12 seconds, much better confidence after same amount of confirmations, better light clients, easier to detect attacks
Layer2
- Deversifi’s layer2 ecosystem map
- Truebit offchain computation verification announces it is live on mainnet
- Vitalik sketches an optimistic rollup using offchain computation verifier
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Stuff for developers
- OpenZeppelin Contracts v4.1, cheaper UUPS proxies, flashmint functionality, multicall batch transactions, plus EIP2098 and SignatureChecker
- OCaml-Solidity: Solidity parser and typechecker library
- Circom & SnarkJS snark plugin for Hardhat
- ZoKrates v0.7.1, constant declaration, constant range checks, and now includes poseidon hash function
- Call state overrides in lates web3.py v5.19 release
- ENS integration best practices
- Remix IDE v0.11.5 adding Solidity’s new “custom errors” feature
- Is your node giving you accurate gas prices from eth_estimateGas?
- $100 in ETH incentive for the first 5 CryptoZombies lessons
- Eric Wall argues Chainlink v2 is less secure than v1
Security
- Samczsun finds a tokenlon vulnerability
- Two big BSC hacks:
- Uranium for $51m in code that didn’t need to be changed
- Spartan for $31m because apparently they didn’t understand what they forked
Ecosystem
- Worried about PoW’s massive energy waste? Ethereum proof of stake is green
- Miners should conservatively plan for mining to end in 2021
- Several mining pools are mining gastokens to sell; they don’t have to pay miners transaction fees for gas tokens
- Gas fees in 20 gwei range this weekend
- Metamask surpasses 5 million monthly active users
Enterprise
- European Investment Bank issues 100m euro, 2 year bond on mainnet Ethereum. This bond is the first “first multi‑dealer led, primary issuance of digitally native tokens.” EIB exec calls Ethereum “revolutionary.”
- Project (L)Ubin continues: DBS, JPMorgan, and Temasek working together on interbank transfers
Application layer
- LarvaLabs’ Meebits, 20000 generative 3d voxel characters
- NFT perpetually programmable song from RAC
- Etherplay Konquest-style alpha on goerli testnet
- General Mills is auctioning NFTs for Dunkaroos re-release. Hasbro floats Magic: the Gathering NFTs
- USDC upgrades to v2.1 to prevent users from sending to contract
Regulation/business/tokens
- JPMorgan note on why ETH is outperforming BTC
- ETH is a better treasury reserve asset than BTC, a summary of TwoPrime’s the rise of institutional Ethereum investors
- Ethereum, the Triple Halving: flows based $ETH analysis
- Justin Drake calculates peak ETH supply
General
- Gemini to launch Mastercard credit card with crypto cashback
- Pete Rizzo chronicles Satoshi’s final days
- Facebook is working on a STARK prover
- Brave browser over 30m MAUs and 10m DAUs
Job Listings
- Join Zerion as Product Manager and take DeFi to the next level
- Giveth is hiring experienced Solidity Devs interested in #Defi4good
- Join our team to help bring Ethereum into governments as a dApp developer
- Enzyme is hiring. Solidity dev, data engineer, UX/UI designer & growth eng.
- Want to work on stateless/EVM? EF JavaScript team is hiring several developers
- BitGo’s WBTC team is hiring Blockchain Engineers, Sr. Blockchain Engineers and Lead Blockchain Engineers. (You can check out the rest of our jobs here!)
Want your job listing here? $345 per line (~75 character limit including spaces), payable in ETH (or 345 DAI or 345 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-may-3-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
- May 6 – OpenZeppelin’s ECDSA/ERC712 sigs to build NFT Merkle Drop workshop
- May 7 – Building on Ethereum with Austin Griffith and Nader Dabit
- May 7 – EIP1559 social coordination call
- May 14 – papers due for WoSCA 2021
- May 14 – Jun 2 – 0xHack
- May 18-21 – EY Global Blockchain Summit
- Jul 20-22 – EthCC4 (Paris)
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