Week in Eth News for November 1, 2020 - thanks to Trail of Bits for making this issue possible
Eth News and Links
Eth1
Retesteth v0.9, test suite for the Berlin hard fork
Latest core devs call. Notes from Tim Beiko. The BLS12-381 precompile (eip2537) is likely not going to be in the next hard fork, which is due in q1 2021. Fork tentatively is: EIP2315 (evm subroutines), EIP2929 (state access gas increase), EIP2718 (typed transaction envelope), EIP2930 (optional access lists) and EIP2565 (modexp precompile gas repricing)
Turbogeth weekly alpha release, faster log storage
Barnabé Monnot’s 1559 fee market/escalator jupyter notebook and tweetstorm
EIPs/standards
EIP3074: Sponsored Transaction Precompile
ERC3076: Validator client interchange standard
EIP3068: precompile for BN256 HashToCurve Algorithms
Proof of Stake launch
Latest what’s new in eth2
Latest eth2 call. Notes from Ben Edgington
Open problem: sub-second transaction latency using staggering
Performance improvements in Nimbus from Medalla’s non-finality period
Loredana’s ewasm VM and debugger
Armiarma network crawler
Medalla exit tool
“all the things you wish you knew about staking,” superphiz’s EthOnline talk
Layer2
Nick Johnson: a general bridge for eth layer2
This newsletter is made possible thanks to Trail of Bits!
Good idea, bad design: How the Diamond standard falls short. We audited an implementation of the Diamond upgradeability proposal and can’t recommend it in its current form. It’s a laudable undertaking, but the Diamond proposal and its implementation raise many concerns. Still, there’s plenty to learn from it.
Stuff for developers
OpenZeppelin’s Defender, with contract administration, transaction relayer, autotask service to call contracts and guides for security best practices. Andre Cronje is a fan
Solidity v0.8.x preview. checked arithmetic operations by default
Lightweight framework for executing multi-step onchain workflows
A react hook Hardhat plugin (fka Buidler)
Multi-file verification in Truffle via Rosco’s plugin
web3J open API: generate API from your Solidity code
Write a call option in Solidity with a Chainlink oracle
The new ethereum.org dev portal - help make Eth dev easier to learn
Security
Harvest attacked for 18m via oracle depegging using flashloans
Attacks as advertising: MakerDAO governance got “friendly attacked” using flash loans by B protocol
Good idea, bad design: Trail of Bits finds issues in Diamond standard implementation. Nick Mudgen’s response
Nansen analyzes whale-heavy SushiSwap farming and finds an exploit
Ecosystem
Token allowances and understanding them as a user
ETHOnline winners and submissions
Enterprise
Central bank digital currencies on Ethereum: ConsenSys selected by Bank of Thailand, Societe General’s work with Banque de France, and the Reserve Bank of Australia
JPMorganCoin (built on Quorum) “being used commercially for the first time this week”
Application layer
B.Protocol (of the Maker flash loan incident) live on mainnet with its Maker liquidator that returns 50% of liquidations to users
dhedge live on mainnet, a social trading platform built on Synthetix
Autonomous lawyering using OpenLaw (writing a memo for a network)
ResearchCoin is giving away 1 million per week of its token to those who post or discuss academic research
Augur adds ETH trading
Catnip.exchange nears 1m USD in daily volume on Trump or Biden market
Ocean v3 live on mainnet, with tokens representing access to the data set (and its value) and a data market built on balancer
ReflexerLabs’ Proto Rai stablecoin using PID controller has an unaudited demo on mainnet
Regulation/business/tokens
Federal Reserve proposes lowering Bank Secrecy Act transaction threshold to $250 from 3000; makes explicit that it applies to stablecoins
Anti-encryption EARN IT bill may get US Senate vote soon
Michael del Castillo reports Binance’s 2018 plan to evade US regulators
Iran quasi-nationalizes crypto miners in attempt to thwart sanctions
Evolution of funding and organization in crypto
LexToken: cheap to deploy erc20, cheap batch mint/transfer, uses permit, adds details and resolver strings for real world assets
General
Singaporean bank DBS deleted a new digital assets exchange page on its website when crypto twitter found it
Cypherpunks video series, final part
Be careful: there has been a sustained Ledger impersonation phishing attempt
Job Listings
Join Status and help drive the JS implementation of Waku and Integrations
Mainframe is hiring a Solidity Smart Contract Engineer
Celer hiring Solidity and Go devs. Email: hiring@celer.network
0x looking for Matcha marketing manager and all flavors of developers
Chainlink has 30+ openings at the moment across marketing, ops, & devs
Trail of Bits hiring cryptography analyst & blockchain security engineers
Want your job listing here? $250 per line (~75 character limit including spaces), payable in ETH (or 250 DAI or 250 USDC) to evan.ethereum.eth. Questions? thecryptonewspodcast at-gmail
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Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
Nov 6-7 - virtual Trufflecon
Nov 12-13 - Baseline Protocol Summit
Nov 16 - MetaMask Provider breaking changes
Nov 19 - EthBerlin 2.5: Talk Show
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