Week in Ethereum News, April 18, 2021 - thanks to Synthetix's Kwenta for making this issue possible!
Eth News and Links
Mainnet execution layer
Latest core devs call. Notes from Tim Beiko. Discussion of future avoidance of OpenEthereum’s bug, plus finalizing what goes into the London release.
OpenEthereum had a bug a few hours into Berlin and thus it went down. Here’s the detailed version of the bug involving access lists and an address reserved for the bls12-381 precompile which is planned but vacant
OpenEthereum v3.2.4 is the latest version with the bugfix
Why did we need to increase gas costs for state access in the Berlin fork?
Turbogeth’s mining functionality will have a devnet launch with a 1 billion gas limit (!)
EIPs/Standards
EIP3508: Transaction Data Opcodes
Proof of stake consensus layer
Latest turning off PoW call. Protolambda’s notes: going through the spec
SigmaPrime’s Lighthouse client update: getting ready for the Altair network upgrade, wrestling with memory allocators
A twitter thread about turning off Pow (“the Merge”) explainer
Layer2
MatterLabs is planning an offchain data availability security model as well as its zksync zk-rollup
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Stuff for developers
Hardhat v2.2, ready for Berlin
Migrating files to workspaces in Remix, plus Remix now available in VSCode
Vyper v0.2.12 is out, also updated for Berlin, plus a medium and low security vulnerability report
Blocknative’s Simulation Platform: simulate via API function calls & net balance changes for what’s in the transaction pool
EVM opcode list updated for Berlin
Ecosystem
Phil Daian: MEV wat do? Argues that MEV must be extracted for security and what you should do about it
Ed Felten’s five theses for transaction ordering: resistance to frontrunning is good, and we’ll be working at it a long time, so we should be careful not to make it worse
Flashbots monthly update: 93 searchers landed ~5500 bundles; they’re probably moving to mev-sgx
Flashbots fair market principles proposal
The history of Synthetix’s fight against frontrunners: impending implementations are TWAP oracles and lower latency on Optimism
Enterprise
JP Morgan testing a Quorum-based product with Taiwanese banks
Videos from JP Morgan’s demo of space-based machine to machine payments using satellites
Application layer
Gelato v2 is live: bots that execute automatically. Now doesn’t need proxy contracts, and data generated offchain
Whether Rai is a stable asset depends on narrative and market participants
Edward Snowden auctions NFT for ~2200 ETH (~$5.5m) to benefit Freedom of Press Foundation, purchased by PleasrDAO
DisasterGirl meme goes for 180 ETH (~$400k)
Etherfreakers update: NFT characters with gameplay (rules in post), some players already deployed a DAO to protect their characters, and 0age has entered the chat
Maker votes against writing a letter asking a16z to participate in Maker governance
Regulation/business/tokens
SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce’s Token Safe Harbor v2 proposal
The perils of progressive decentralization: an argument for community first, product-market fit second
ConsenSys announces $65m fundraising round from JPMorgan, UBS, Mastercard and Filecoin’s ProtocolLabs
Andre Cronje: scams pumping during bull markets is demotivating for builders
Justin Drake calculates that 1559 and turning off PoW will produce more buy pressure per year than the eth2 deposit contract and Grayscale trust combined
Arthur Hayes says price/revenue models have ETH massively undervalued
General
Is Google FLoC’ing you? By default Chrome now gives your browsing history to advertisers and websites
How to beat a sweeper and recover your assets from a compromised private key
r/WallStreetBets now allowing ETH and memecoin (BTC/DOGE) talk
Job Listings
bZx is hiring a Lead Developer. 400k/year total comp. Apply here.
Enzyme is hiring. Solidity dev, data engineer, UX/UI designer & growth eng.
Element Finance, launching very soon, is hiring a Solidity engineer
Nomic Labs (Hardhat/Buidler) is hiring a senior dev and an engineering manager
Want to work on stateless/EVM? EF JavaScript team is hiring several developers
Want your job listing here? $345 per line (~75 character limit including spaces), payable in ETH (or 345 DAI or 345 USDC) to evan.ethereum.eth. Questions? thecryptonewspodcast at-gmail
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Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
April 20 - deadline for beacon chain security and testing RFP
April 20 - deadline to comment on FATF anti-DeFi regulatory proposal
April 20 - OG NFT conference
April 22 - Ethereum in the Enterprise 2021
April 22 - OpenZeppelin managing upgrades workshop
April 23 - submissions due for network crawler RFP
May 14 - papers due for WoSCA 2021
May 14 - Jun 2 - 0xHack
Jul 20-22 - EthCC4 (Paris)
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