Week in Ethereum News, April 4, 2021 - thanks to Uniswap for making this issue possible!
Indeed
Eth News and Links
Mainnet
Latest core devs call. Beiko’s notes: Berlin on track for April 14 or 15 (block 12244000).
London testnet Aleut to include EIP1559 and EIP3198 (BASEFEE opcode). EIP3238 (difficulty bomb delay) must also be in London.
Potential London/Shanghai EIPs include: EIP3403 (disable gas refunds), EIP3074 (AUTH and AUTHCALL) and EIP2537 (BLS precompile)
EthereumJS VM v5.3.0 with EIP-2930 Access List generation + a new Block Builder API
Dan Finlay on safety of EIP3074 AUTH and AUTHCALL opcodes and Alexey’s response
EIP2537 and EVM384 paths for enabling BLS12-381 support
EVM384 update: benchmarks vs precompile
Proposed opcode GASMETER to allow removing GAS opcode
Make eip1559 more like an AMM curve (this is for the future; not going into the 1559/London upgrade)
Stateless Ethereum updated roadmap: prioritizing allowing stateless stakers and constraining state growth
EIPs/Standards
EIP3447: New transaction parameter for latest block number inclusion
EIP3448: MetaProxy Factory Standard
EIP3450: Shamir + BIP-39
Proof of Stake
Danny Ryan’s Finalized PoS update: the effort to turn off PoW is making progress, plus a reminder of RfP for PoS security and testing.
Guido Vranken’s fuzzing found a bug in the blst library’s inverse function. Update your staking clients to latest version (just to be on the safe side).
What’s necessary to turn off PoW from a mainnet client perspective
Prysm’s merge demo using Catalyst (Geth fork)
Vitalik: cap active validators so that devs can safely make assumptions about non-finalizing edge cases
Rayonism: an ambitious Scaling Eth hackathon project to create testnets to turn off PoW AND add data shards with rollup integrations
Layer2
zkSync roadmap update: EVM on zkrollup, plan public testnet in May. They’ll also have NFTs on their mainnet in May
ELI5 of Celer’s layer2.finance: move your money to rollup and the rollup batches DeFi transactions
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Stuff for developers
Compound's new governance code (Bravo) is live, more tunable and with more features
Slither v0.7.1, solc version recommendations increased to 0.7.6
Prepare smart contracts for Berlin Hardfork with Tenderly, now includes Access List Tool
Solar: interactive analysis tool
4byte npm: look up an Ethereum function sig from its 4 byte hash
dharmaOS: an SDK to connect any EVM protocol action to Dharma’s (currently US only) payment rails.
Security/incidents
Blocksec list of security incidents
samczsun: Importance of client consensus via a bug in uncle validation
Ecosystem
Flashbots.tools: a Flashbots frontend to easily execute a gasless ERC20 token transfer from your browser
27% of Eth hashpower is now in Flashbots, so remember to be careful when providing liquidity
Is Oracle Extractable Value the new Miner Extractable Value? Maker’s strategies to thwart malicious oracles
Devcon Attendee Survey with POAP for completion
Vitalik's review of Gitcoin Grants round 9; make bribes and retroactive airdrops cryptographically impossible using MACI
Astrodrop: Merkle tree airdrop for just 212k gas
Traffic to ethereum.org is up 4x since December
Enterprise
Visa transactions settled with USDC on Eth mainnet
Application layer
Algo stablecoin Fei launched on mainnet, got oversubscribed with ~$1.3b in ETH (eg meaning Fei launched at $1.01) leading to some instability
RAC’s NFT sale makes ~$700k “more than I've received for 3 albums / 10yrs of work” as a musician
Ex-Ujo Jack Spallone’s 31 ideas for music and crypto
ConsenSys announced an NFT sidechain which will feature Damien Hirst
After last weekend’s skit, of course Saturday Night Live sells an NFT this week
Overly Attached Girlfriend meme goes for 200 Eth (~$400k)
What is fungibility in tokens?
Ether Freakers, like CryptoKitties but with a game. No frontend yet.
Regulation/business/tokens
Coinbase listing set for April 14
Tether assurance opinion from Cayman accounting firm
Burniske: the original sin of many crypto projects is unequal distribution
List of the biggest DAO war chests
General
Participate in the multi-party computation ceremony for zkopru. It’s very easy!
Dharma wallet adds $25k fiat into DeFi with a tap and massive gas savings via batching (fiat rails sadly US only at the moment)
PayPal launches checkout with crypto
Vitalik critiques the anti-PoS arguments from Bitcoiners
Auction of 23 TLDs (eg .lol and .link) includes the ENS version and NFT
The Onion: priceless NFT vandalized with MSPaint
Wormhole: send files end-to-end encrypted, based on Webtorrent
Job Listings
Mark Cuban is hiring a Solidity developer. Send a code sample to apply.
Showtime, the NFT social network, is hiring for more roles
Status are hiring! Protocol Engineer, Mobile UI Engineer, Security Engineer
3Box Labs is hiring! Backend, FS + Protocol Devs for Ceramic Network
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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Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-april-4-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
April 8 - OpenZeppelin’s Solidity access control workshop
April 9 - May 14 - ETHGlobal’s Scaling Ethereum hackathon
April 14 - Berlin upgrade fork (block 12244000)
April 16 - Rollup community grant applications due
April 20 - deadline for beacon chain security and testing RFP
April 20 - deadline to comment on FATF anti-DeFi regulatory proposal
April 22 - Ethereum in the Enterprise 2021
May 14 - papers due for WoSCA 2021
May 14 - Jun 2 - 0xHack
Jul 20-22 - EthCC4 (Paris)
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