Eth News and Links
Eth R&D protocol calls (All Core Devs)
- Eth R&D protocol call focused on consensus layer (ACDC #143):
- Pectra upgrade:
- Pectra-devnet-3: minor bugs being resolved
- Pectra-devnet-4: open issue for EIP7685 execution layer requests on whether to send requests or hashes
- Public testnet: planned for Devcon, Pectra-devnet-4 spec, name suggestions wanted
- Blob increase: more data needed, engine_getBlobsV1 being implemented by client teams to help stakers with low bandwidth
- Pectra upgrade:
- Eth R&D protocol call focused on execution layer (ACDE) #197:
- Pectra upgrade scope:
- Included EIPs (pectra-devnet-3 spec): EIP2537 BLS precompile, EIP2935 historical block hashes in state, EIP6110 validator deposits onchain, EIP7002 execution layer triggerable exits, EIP7251 increase max effective balance, EIP7549 committee index outside attestation, EIP7685 general purpose execution layer requests & EIP7702 EOA account code for one transaction
- Considered for inclusion: EIP7623 increase calldata cost, EIP7742 decouple blob count, EIP7762 increase min blob fee and a blob increase (needs more analysis & concerns about stakers with low bandwidth)
- Fusaka upgrade scope: included EIP7594 PeerDAS & EIP7692 EOF. No other EIPs will be scheduled for inclusion until there is a working Fusaka devnet
- Amsterdam upgrade scope: Verkle EIPs considered for inclusion
- Pectra upgrade scope:
Pectra (Prague + Electra) upgrade
- Blob increase proposal:
- Nixo: blob increase & solo staking
- Toni Wahrstätter: impact of blobs on reorgs and analysis of solo staking & local block building
- Client optimizations to support blob increases, engine_getBlobsV1 & IDONTWANT, followed by PeerDAS & ePBS
- Data Always: case for increasing minimum blob base fee (EIP7762), makes blobspace market more responsive to demand
- Consensus-specs v1.5.0-alpha.7
- Weekly testing call #7
Fusaka (Osaka + Fulu) upgrade
- PeerDAS:
- peerdas-devnet-2: launched but will need to be relaunched due to missing invalid sidecar check
- PeerDAS breakout #9: rebase on Pectra after pectra-devnet-4
- PeerDAS & distributed blob building: bottlenecks, optimizations, testing and impact on solo stakers
- EOF implementers call #59: release tests on top of Prague broken, discussed migration to Osaka
Amsterdam upgrade
- Stateless implementers call #25 (formerly Verkle): refining gas costs to support EIP7702, partial witness charging and devnet-7 coming soon starting with local testing
Centralization watch: threatening the value of your ETH
- 🚨 Lido at 28.1%, still too close to 33.3% threshold
- Client diversity (via clientdiversity.org):
- Execution layer: Geth ~52% majority
- Consensus layer: Prysm 37%
- Any client bug over 33.3% could mean loss of finality
- Better geographic diversity is optimal, particularly outside of North America & Europe
Layer 1
- EIP7732 ePBS:
- Potuz: ePBS benefits, lower CPU & bandwidth requirements, less missed attestations, less reorgs and no trusted intermediaries
- ePBS breakout #10: steady progress by client teams, aiming for devnet before Devcon
- IPv6 support by clients dashboard: most clients can use dual stack, IPv6 not enabled by default
- Flashbots: MEV searcher running in Intel TDX
- Aestus Relay: MEV-Boost timing games as a service
For stakers
- EthStaker: solo staker bandwidth survey
- Contribute to Xatu data by running a xatu sentry sidecar on beacon node
Research
- Fork-Choice enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL) workflow: roles & duties of inclusion list committee members, nodes, proposers & attesters and edge case mitigations for equivocation, invalidation & inclusion list stuffing
- Terence: inclusion list out of protocol market risks
- Proposal to move state root to start of next block to reduce latency & increase throughput
- Tuyen optimization to aggregate multiple attestations over the same message
Client Releases
- Consensus layer:
- Nimbus v24.9.0: adds support for additional beacon API endpoints and stability fixes
- Execution layer:
- Erigon v3.0.0-alpha4: resync for better performance on chain-tip
- Geth v1.14.11: new docker images; v1.14.10: hot fix for v1.14.9 blob pool regression
- Reth v1.0.8: ExEx support for experimental Engine API, RPC bug fixes & performance improvements
Layer 2
- Base 17 minute block building outage on September 21 due to sequencer cluster misconfiguration
- Growthepie L2 economics dashboard: revenue, costs, profit/loss, margin & blob data used
EIPs/Standards
- EIPs (Ethereum improvement proposals):
- ERCs (application layer):
Stuff for developers
- Foundry:
- Forge-std v1.9.3: adds cheatcodes publicKeyP256, pause/resumeTracing, resetGasMetering, expectPartialRevert, setArbitraryStorage, copyStorage, mockFunction, assumeNoRevert, keyExists, getArtifactPathByCode/DeployedCode, parseTomlType, skip with reason and random bool/bytes/int/uint
- Hardhat v2.22.12: ~10% performance improvement from internal Solidity tracing refactor
- Solidity bugs viewer organized by version
- OpenZeppelin Contracts v5.1.0-rc.0: reentrancy guard & ERC20 approval using transient storage, adds Errors, Hashes, Packing, Panic & SlotDerivation utilities, adds P256 & RSA cryptographic primitives and adds CircularBuffer, Heap & MerkleTree data structures
- Multiproof v1 (Solidity library): generate Merkle proofs for testing in Foundry
- Solgauss (Solidity library): statistical functions rationally approximated, includes erfc, erfinv, erfcinv, ppf & and cdf
- Viem-deal: deal ERC20 tokens by manipulating account balance with setStorageAt
- Halmos v0.2: expands focus to finding bugs & exploits, adds cheatcode to generate calldata and adds branching over symbolic call addresses
- Runtime Verification: formal verification of loops
- Patrick Collins: flash loans guide
- RareSkills: common Solidity mistakes by beginners
- CTFs:
- Secureum RACE #33: answers to 8 question Solidity quiz
- Micro-eth-signer v0.12.0: adds EIP7702 and EIP7495 SSZ stable container support
- Bashquiat Discv5 in Bash
Security
- EF RFP: Pectra system contracts audit wanted for EIP2935, EIP7002 & EIP7251
- Bedrock uniBTC $2M exploit on 8 chains via minting using native tokens
- Onyx Protocol (Compound v2 fork) $3.8M exploit via unverified user input
- Shezmu $4.9M exploit, funds recovered minus 20% bounty
- Banana Gun (Telegram trading bot) $3M exploit
- Malicious VSCode Solidity extension
Ecosystem
- Vitalik: legible Ethereum alignment using metrics of open source, open standards, decentralization & security and positive sum
- ETHGlobal Singapore finalists
Enterprise
- Visa tokenized asset platform: banks can issue fiat-backed stablecoins on public Ethereum, testing only this year, BBVA expected to have live pilots in 2025
- PayPal paid EY invoice using PYUSD stablecoin via SAP’s digital currency hub
- PayPal enabled US business accounts to buy, hold, sell & transfer crypto
Job Listings
- Sigma Prime is hiring Rust developers and security engineers. Remote roles!
- Status free.technology is hiring a Business Developer. More jobs at IFT!
- Nethermind InfoSec Head, Sr Dev, SRE Lead, Sr Embedded Dev & UX UI designer
- Nomos is hiring Ecosystem Developer, Rust Engineer & Applied Researcher!
Job listings: $600 for 4 issues (75 char limit). Pay using 3cities. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail
Onchain stats
- Fees (via ultrasound.money):
- Gas: 2.5 to 76.7 gwei, 10.2 gwei average; zero net issuance at 24.3 gwei
- 11k ETH net issuance this week
- ETHUSD: $2,316 – $2,701, currently $2,418, all time high $4,878
- ETHBTC: currently 0.039 (Flippening at ~0.164)
Notable at app layer
- Ethereum follow protocol (onchain social graph) live: follow & tag accounts
- Drakula (iOS app): scrollable video feed, mint videos & trade memecoins on Base
- ZKP2P Domains: trade web2 domains registered with Namecheap
- Azuki x Flashbots: tokenized delegation to make single tweet using Teleport
- Jelly Beans: guess the number (or lower) for future onchain events to win OP
Regulation/business/tokens
- Roman Storm motion to dismiss denied, trial scheduled for December
- Inside Biden destroying crypto-friendly banks
- US SEC end of fiscal year actions:
- TrustToken & TrueCoin settled for sale of TUSD
- Mango settled for sale of MNGO tokens
- UK Gambling Commission prosecuting Sorare
General
- Ethereum obituaries: all the times Eth declared dead since 2014
- KrebsOnSecurity: Adam Iza allegedly bribed cops & stole from cybercriminals
END OF SERVICE: plan to deprecate Week in Ethereum News
Editor: @abcoathup
Follow @WeekinEthNews for the most clicked links
Permalink: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-october-5-2024
Upcoming Dates of Note
(new/changes in bold)
- Oct 16 – Gitcoin Grants 22, OSS application deadline
- Oct 17-19 – ETHSofia conference & hackathon
- Oct 18-20 – ETHGlobal San Francisco hackathon
- Oct 25-27 – ETHSydney hackathon
- Nov 12-15 – Devcon 7 – Southeast Asia (Bangkok)
- Nov 15-17 – ETHGlobal Bangkok hackathon
- Dec 6-8 – ETHIndia hackathon
Sign up to receive this newsletter weekly