Week in Ethereum News




Week in Ethereum News
October 16, 2021

Eth News and Links

Mainnet execution layer

  • Latest core devs call video. Notes from Tim Beiko: 
    • Aim for code to switch off PoW forever to be ready by Feb 2022
    • Arrow Glacier upgrade around 8 Dec (block 13,773,000) delays difficulty bomb to around June 2022 (offset 10,700,000) with buffer for longer rollout of PoW switch off if needed and/or large hash rate changes
    • OpenEthereum client is deprecated and won’t support PoW switch off
  • Calculating the difficulty bomb offset for Arrow Glacier upgrade
  • Geth v1.10.10: bug fixes
  • Erigon v2021.10.03: state cache on remote RPC daemons

EIPs/Standards

Proof of stake consensus layer

  • Pithos public testnet (switch off PoW): 
  • Recap of Amphora week in Greece, execution and consensus layer client teams major milestone to switch off PoW forever
  • Annotated beacon chain spec
  • Consensus layer specs v1.1.3
  • Beacon chain API spec v2.1
  • Nimbus v1.5.1:users of v1.5.0 need to update, fix for deposit contract sync issue
  • Vitalik’s two-slot proposer/builder separation proposal for beacon chain
  • Stereum 1.8 (beacon chain client installer): update for security fixes from audit
  • Péter’s minority client: orchestrator to only accept a state change if majority of multiple execution/consensus clients agree

Layer2

  • Demo of Uniswap v2 fork (Solidity contracts & dapp) on zkEVM testnet
  • zkSync Reddit AMA
  • Arbitrum Nitro upgrade preview: runs on WASM, replaces custom EVM emulator with Geth, estimated 20-50x execution speed increase
  • zkevm-circuits v0.0.1: first release, implements PUSHX, POP, ADD, SUB, LT, GT opcodes

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Celer

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Stuff for developers

  • Replit (web based IDE) adds Solidity support: no setup, built in testnet, contract live editing (hot reloading), shareable dapps and contracts
  • Hardhat VSCode extension coming in 2022
  • EthernautDAO challenges: complete challenges whilst learning Solidity and web3 development
  • Jolly Roger: updated dapp template using Hardhat, Svelte and The Graph
  • Storage layout discovery in ERC20 contracts by brute force using Hardhat
  • Prysmatic Labs’ software design principles applied to Go
  • EthTx v.0.3.1: improved proxy processing, uses 4byte directory for unknown signatures, ENS aware 
  • topic0: database of hashes to event log signatures, for log decoding, extracted from Sourcify verified contracts
  • RICKS NFT fractionalization implementation, but with deterministic buyout, on-demand auction and a staking pool
  • Guide to designing NFT launches: focus on unexploitable fairness, avoid race conditions and consider cost-efficiency; reference implementation
  • Circom v2.0 (zero-knowledge circuit compiler), rewritten in Rust, 10x faster compilation
  • rk4-starknet (Cairo): Runge-Kutta 4th Order Method, precursor to on chain physics engine
  • MACI v1: contracts and zk circuits to build collusion resistant voting and quadratic funding platforms; v1 has improved developer experience and lower gas costs for users

Security

Ecosystem

Enterprise

Application layer

  • DeFi v2.0: experiments in protocol controlled liquidity as an alternative to liquidity mining (DeFi v1.0)
  • volmex.finance v1 live on Arbitrum
  • Futureswap V4 beta on Arbitrum, trades 90% cheaper, executing in ~0.05 seconds
  • dYdX Solo on mainnet winding down, close only mode from Nov 1
  • Pods on-chain options protocol live on mainnet
  • Fuse allows permissionless pools
  • USM stable token: minimalist ERC20 system, ownerless and immutable, consisting of a stable token and a volatile token
  • Umbra stealth address payments out of beta, setup now single transaction
  • Gnosis Safe live on Arbitrum
  • Blitnauts released into public domain (CC0)
  • TikTok’s first NFT is Curtis Roach’s Bored in the House
  • Sotheby’s Metaverse curated NFT marketplace

Job Listings

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

General

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-october-16-2021/

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):

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