Week in Ethereum News, May 3, 2021 - thanks to NEAR for making this issue possible!
Eth News and Links
Mainnet execution layer
Latest core devs call. Notes from Tim Beiko
Decided: EIP3529 (getting rid of gas refunds) included in London fork, difficulty bomb postponed to q2 2022, including EIP3541 in London to be decided next call, also timing for London to be decided next call
Idea: charge gas to access each individual contiguous 31-byte segment of code, to put a ceiling on witness size
Updated EVM384 Geth benchmarking
EIPs/Standards
EIP3540: Ethereum Object Format
EIP3541: Reject new contracts starting with the 0xEF byte (a stepping stone to 3540)
EIP3534: Restricted Chain Context Type Transactions
ERC3525: Versatile NFT
ERC3549: Anti-sleepminting ERC721 Metadata sig
Proof of stake consensus layer
First ephemeral multi-client testnet to turn off PoW with 12 different client combinations; a surprising amount of consensus.
A longer lasting testnet coming in next week or so
Client diversity matters: switch to Lighthouse (or another minority client) for your own good and the good of the network. They have a neat feature I didn’t know about: use Teku for redundancy even if Lighthouse node has a bug.
Reminder: we have four fantastic consensus clients: Lighthouse, Nimbus, Prysm, Teku
Prysmatic post-mortem on last week’s staking hiccups coming from an invalid Eth deposit root hash in the cache initialization for deposits
What would’ve happened if the staking hiccups had occurred after we turn off PoW
Barnabé Monnot: graphical view of staking hiccup event.
Chain never stopped finalizing, “strong evidence for the robustness of the protocol”
A demo of Teku’s sync in a minute
Latest turning off PoW call, notes from Shane Lightowler
Work in progress design for stakers to withdraw
There’s now more than 4 million ETH in the staking contract
Vitalik on some underappreciated PoS benefits: regular blocks every 12 seconds, much better confidence after same amount of confirmations, better light clients, easier to detect attacks
Layer2
Deversifi’s layer2 ecosystem map
Truebit offchain computation verification announces it is live on mainnet
Vitalik sketches an optimistic rollup using offchain computation verifier
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Stuff for developers
OpenZeppelin Contracts v4.1, cheaper UUPS proxies, flashmint functionality, multicall batch transactions, plus EIP2098 and SignatureChecker
OCaml-Solidity: Solidity parser and typechecker library
Circom & SnarkJS snark plugin for Hardhat
ZoKrates v0.7.1, constant declaration, constant range checks, and now includes poseidon hash function
Call state overrides in lates web3.py v5.19 release
Remix IDE v0.11.5 adding Solidity’s new “custom errors” feature
Is your node giving you accurate gas prices from eth_estimateGas?
$100 in ETH incentive for the first 5 CryptoZombies lessons
Eric Wall argues Chainlink v2 is less secure than v1
Security
Samczsun finds a tokenlon vulnerability
Two big BSC hacks:
Uranium for $51m in code that didn’t need to be changed
Spartan for $31m because apparently they didn’t understand what they forked
Ecosystem
Worried about PoW’s massive energy waste? Ethereum proof of stake is green
Miners should conservatively plan for mining to end in 2021
Several mining pools are mining gastokens to sell; they don’t have to pay miners transaction fees for gas tokens
Gas fees in 20 gwei range this weekend
Metamask surpasses 5 million monthly active users
Enterprise
European Investment Bank issues 100m euro, 2 year bond on mainnet Ethereum. This bond is the first “first multi‑dealer led, primary issuance of digitally native tokens.” EIB exec calls Ethereum “revolutionary.”
Project (L)Ubin continues: DBS, JPMorgan, and Temasek working together on interbank transfers
Application layer
LarvaLabs’ Meebits, 20000 generative 3d voxel characters
NFT perpetually programmable song from RAC
Etherplay Konquest-style alpha on goerli testnet
General Mills is auctioning NFTs for Dunkaroos re-release. Hasbro floats Magic: the Gathering NFTs
USDC upgrades to v2.1 to prevent users from sending to contract
Regulation/business/tokens
JPMorgan note on why ETH is outperforming BTC
ETH is a better treasury reserve asset than BTC, a summary of TwoPrime’s the rise of institutional Ethereum investors
Ethereum, the Triple Halving: flows based $ETH analysis
Justin Drake calculates peak ETH supply
General
Gemini to launch Mastercard credit card with crypto cashback
Pete Rizzo chronicles Satoshi’s final days
Facebook is working on a STARK prover
Brave browser over 30m MAUs and 10m DAUs
Job Listings
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Want to work on stateless/EVM? EF JavaScript team is hiring several developers
BitGo's WBTC team is hiring Blockchain Engineers, Sr. Blockchain Engineers and Lead Blockchain Engineers. (You can check out the rest of our jobs here!)
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Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
May 6 - OpenZeppelin’s ECDSA/ERC712 sigs to build NFT Merkle Drop workshop
May 7 - Building on Ethereum with Austin Griffith and Nader Dabit
May 7 - EIP1559 social coordination call
May 14 - papers due for WoSCA 2021
May 14 - Jun 2 - 0xHack
May 18-21 - EY Global Blockchain Summit
Jul 20-22 - EthCC4 (Paris)
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