Eth News and Links
Mainnet execution layer
- Bonsai Tries flat storage model reduces Besu full archive to less than 1TB
- Piper Merriam’s Aperture Portal Network update: two clients building a network to serve state
EIPs/Standards
- EIP4345: Difficulty Bomb Delay to May 2022
Proof of stake consensus layer
- Danny Ryan’s Altair upgrade announcement: update your staking clients by Oct 27! Bug bounty for critical Altair bugs now up to $100k
- Client teams working on PoW switch off interop:
- Devnet confirmed; watch the consensus monitor
- Video of Teku/Lighthouse with Geth/Besu staying in sync and finalising after Altair upgrade and PoW switch off transition
- Interop day by day accomplishments
- Latest What’s New in Eth2: reflections on interop gathering to create long standing multiclient testnets to switch off PoW
- Consensus specs v1.1.2: fixes Altair and PoW switch off test generators
- MergeMock: mock execution engine and consensus node for testing
- Merge-fuzz: framework to test engine API
- List of consensus client switching guides
- Ethstaker survey to understand needs of stakers
- Rocket Pool (staking pool) launch delayed to address vulnerability
Layer2
- StarkNet alpha on mainnet planned for November: permissioned deployment and no backward compatibility guarantee between alpha & beta
- Arbitrum testnet explorer by Etherscan
- Validity proof amortization: zkRollup transactions get much cheaper with more use
- zkRollup without transaction history data enables private contract execution with calldata efficiency
This newsletter is made possible thanks to NEAR!
NEAR CON Alpha is taking place in Lisbon on October 26th & 27th. The event is open to everyone to come and celebrate NEAR’s 1 Year Anniversary since Mainnet launch. Immerse yourself in two days of talks, networking, workshops and a whole lot more provided by the NEAR Ecosystem and its Community.
Stuff for developers
- CREATE3 contract library to deploy contracts, deterministic address depends only on the salt and not the code, fixed 60k extra gas cost
- SSTORE2 contract storage, cheaper than native storage for > 64 bytes, up to 17x cheaper than SLOAD and 3x cheaper than SSTORE, unaudited
- ERC3652PureProxy: CREATE2 based pure proxy factory, executes delegate call in constructor
- Fisher-Yates Shuffle, random on chain shuffle, O(n) complexity
- noble-hashes: fast, secure, minimal JavaScript implementations of SHA2, SHA3, RIPEMD, BLAKE2, HMAC, HKDF, PBKDF2 & Scrypt
- prb-math.js: JavaScript for PRBMath Solidity library, use in testing
- Ξthernaut’s Solidity Trivia questions
- eth-sdk: generate type-safe SDK for a contract using the address
- Solidity dynamic array in storage can overwrite contract storage when using onlyOwner modifier
- Vyper v0.3.0: refactored legacy backend, unblocks progress on requested features, use with care
- Otterscan v2021.10.01: transaction decoding of non-verified contracts and improved support for Sourcify verified contracts
- mev-inspect-py: finds miner payments, token transfers, swaps and arbs
- Guide to setting up Nile for StarkNet’s Cairo language
- Auto battler logic in Python with STARK proof in Cairo
Security
- COMP at risk increased to ~490k, drip function sent ~200k COMP backlog to Comptroller, community have been returning COMP
- Staking pool vulnerability impacting Lido and Rocket Pool, deposit can be frontrun putting funds at risk, flagged by StakeWise, raised in Eth Research in late 2019
- Searcher contract exploited for $1 million as token approvals function didn’t have appropriate checks
Ecosystem
- Coinbase adopted EIP1559 transactions, 9% gas fee saving (~27 ETH per day) and improved confirmation time
- Flashbots Protect: API for dapps to integrate, RPC for wallets to use to send transactions via Flashbots
- Ethereum.org available in 37 languages
- NFT Fest Australia videos
- Nominate projects for retroactive public goods funding, $1 million given away from Optimism fees
Application layer
- ENS profiles support NFT avatars
- Mirror opens publishing to all
- Rune pitches a vision for MakerDAO where Dai backed by solar, wind and ESG corporate bonds, plus updated tokenomics allowing locked MKR to have greater voting power with more attractive rates
- Etherscan visualisations of state of bridges
- Difference between Nexus Mutual token price (from bonding curve) and wrapped token price (market sentiment) used for 50% discount on buying coverage
- Ethereum leads NFT ecosystem with over $6 billion in secondary sales
- Context beta, follow NFT activity of DAOs, creators and collectors
- RICKS (Recurrently Issued Collectively Kept Shards), use cases include fractionalized NFTs and addressing DAO apathy
- Infinity decentralized NFT marketplace, vampire attack of OpenSea with governance token airdrop
Job Listings
- Lodestar (consensus client) hiring TypeScript protocol engineer
- Ethereum Foundation: Research Intern, read/think/write with Josh Stark
- Nethermind 1-3 month internship program
- Team Lead for the Ecosystem Support Program at the Ethereum Foundation
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
- Circle received investigative subpoena from Enforcement Division of US SEC in July
- US Justice department creates National Cryptocurrency Enforcement team focusing on money laundering
- IMF: Crypto ecosystem and financial stability challenges, stablecoins require regulations proportionate to risk and economic functions they serve
- Bloomberg investigates reserves backing Tether
- US FDIC reported to be investigating pass through deposit insurance for stablecoins
General
- Text message routing company had unauthorized access of its databases, potential access to billions of SMS messages
- Geofence and keyword warrants: Google gave US authorities info on anyone near a given location or who searched keywords
- Twitch breached, with source code and payouts leaked
- Facebook outage due to config change
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-9-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
- Oct 18 – ENS online workshop
- Oct 20-21 – LisCon (Lisbon)
- Oct 22-24 – ETH Lisbon hackathon
- Oct 25 – Dec 13 – Gitcoin DAO Global hackathon (virtual)
- Oct 27 – Beacon chain upgrade to Altair epoch 74240
- Oct 28-29 – ETH Portland hackathon
- Nov 1-4 – NFT.NYC sold out
- Mar 28-30 – ETHDubai
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