Eth News and Links
Mainnet execution layer
- PoW switch off community call:
- average block times change from ~13s to 12s, contracts may have hardcoded ~13s assumption
- Dankrad’s slides on finding the safe head of the chain
- Erigon v2021.11.01: first beta release, not downgradeable
EIPs/Standards
- EIP4399: Supplant DIFFICULTY opcode with RANDOM
Proof of Stake consensus layer
- Danny Ryan’s Finalized PoS update: proposed forkchoice fixes can mitigate 3 liveness & reorg attacks and won’t delay switching off PoW
- Tweet thread of reorgs in PoS and mitigation strategies
- Latest What’s New in Eth2
- PoS implementers call. Notes from Ben Edgington:
- Kintsugi milestone tracker to a persistent testnet early December
- Pyrmont testnet to be shut down
- Staking rewards after Altair upgrade are more variable:
- Attestations: 0.0040-0.0042 ETH per day
- Blocks: 0.018-0.03 ETH per block
- Sync committee membership: 0.08 ETH per sync committee selection
- MEV-Boost for validators, work in progress Flashbots architecture sitting between consensus and execution clients
Layer2
- Future of zk rollups to scale Ethereum, sidechains should take the pragmatic approach and become zk-rollups
- Connext adds mainnet support, transfer stablecoins between mainnet, Arbitrum and selected sidechains
This newsletter is made possible thanks to NEAR & Aurora!
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Aurora is providing $25,000 to the Chainlink Fall 2021 Hackathon.
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Create a connector that allows moving native NEAR NFTs back and forth from NEAR to Ethereum using Aurora’s Rainbow Bridge.
Develop with Aurora and Chainlink to spur a major surge of innovation across the NFT economy, and the larger smart contract ecosystem.
Details: chainlink-fall-hackathon-2021.devpost.com
Stuff for developers
- Solidity docs code examples can be opened in Remix
- solidity-trigonometry: basic trig functions, sin & cos are 2-2.5k gas
- nft-swap-sdk: TypeScript SDK using 0x v3 protocol to swap NFTs
- NFT Floor Market: on chain NFT marketplace contract, no fees other than royalties, unaudited
- Otterscan v2021.10.05: improved ABI outline UI for verified contracts and resolving token names from addresses
- ArchiveNode: free access to small time developers to archive data
- StarkNet playground: compile and deploy Cairo contracts
- Warp (Solidity to Cairo transpiler) example of transpiling two composable contracts & deploying them
- starknet-react-example: connect React app to StarkNet Cairo contract
- zksnarks-library: commonly used logic and examples implemented into SNARKs using the Circom language
- plonkit: zkSNARK toolkit to work with Circom
Security
- Fuse community pool drained after VUSD price manipulated on Uniswap v3, TWAPs can be subject to manipulation
- Solidity not affected by Trojan Source, Solidity Underhanded Contest 2020 winner exploited Unicode direction markers & was fixed in v0.7.6
- Tincho’s Damn Vulnerable DeFi v2: Solidity v0.8, four new levels, new (broken) integrations and Hardhat + Ethers tests
Ecosystem
- Ethereum Foundation Q2 grantees, $8m in grants
- Devcon Archive v2: improved UX & content discovery, more content on IPFS and community curated playlists
- Optimism’s $1m retroactive public goods funding recipients
- Padawan DAO: funding scholarships for highschool and university students to attend their first crypto conferences
Enterprise
- US Postal Service Day of the Dead NFT stamp art on VeVe (Immutable)
- Marvel Eternals movie NFTs on VeVe (Immutable)
- Burger King US loyalty program offers chance to win 1 ETH or 1 memecoin via RobinHood
- Paradigm Founder Matt Huang joins Stripe’s board to help guide web3 strategy
Application layer
- ENS DAO: users can claim & delegate governance tokens per account, token farm accounts are being manually excluded
- Maker DAI Direct Deposit Module: privileged access for Aave to mint DAI
- Notional v2 live on mainnet, longer-dated maturities and flexible dates
- Angle Finance live on mainnet, Euro stablecoin
- Aave v3 overview
- NFTX Swaps: swap NFTs in same collection
- Spaces: message any address or ENS, token gated chats
Job Listings
- Toucan: Solidity dev to build web3 infrastructure to reverse climate change
- OpenZeppelin hiring a Technical Marketing Manager
- Solidity is hiring a C++ dev
Reach people experienced with Ethereum. $420 for two issues (~75 character limit), payable in ETH/DAI/USDC to abcoathup.eth. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail
Regulation/business/tokens
- US Presidents Working Group on Financial Markets stablecoin statement calling for congressional action
- Commonwealth Bank (major Australian bank) to add crypto services to its banking app using Gemini
- Turing-complete governance, composable & arbitrarily programmable
- Bankless: Ethereum is the triple point blockchain
- Early employees to sue ConsenSys over asset valuations
General
- Harry Denley: Twitter and Facebook server side unfurling engines can be abused for phishing
- Vitalik on crypto cities, make existing processes more trusted & transparent and experiment with city tokens & participatory governance
- Random oracles in cryptography, using hashes that are not good imitations of random oracles can lead to broken protocols
- Vitalik: Incremental verification and SNARKs with no pairings and no trusted setups
- Bounties worth $172k for breaking zk friendly hash functions, Rescue Prime, Feistel-MiMC, Poseidon and Reinforced Concrete
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-november-6-2021
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
- Oct 25 – Dec 13 – Gitcoin DAO Global hackathon (virtual)
- Nov 11 – Optimism upgrade
- Nov 16 – Formal Verification in the Ethereum Ecosystem
- Dec 1-16 – Gitcoin Grants Round 12
- Dec ~8 – Arrow Glacier upgrade block 13,773,000
- Jan 24-26 – Science of Blockchain Conference (Stanford University)
- Feb 11-20 – ETHDenver
- Mar 28-30 – ETHDubai
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