Week in Ethereum News, April 9, 2022 - thanks to Starbloom Ventures for making this issue possible!
Eth News and Links
Mainnet execution layer
Erigon stabilizing alpha version with merge support, full sync required as DB layout not compatible with beta version
Verkle tree Condrieu testnet relaunched twice for continued stress-testing
Predicting access lists to reduce state retrieval time for Portal network clients
Proof of Stake consensus layer
PoS implementers call video. Notes from Ben Edgington & Christine Kim:
Timing of forking public testnets to be decided at Core Devs call on April 29, clients to be feature complete or need to delay difficulty bomb
Goerli shadow fork #3 had issue impacting small subset of Geth nodes
mainnet shadow fork switches to PoS on April 11;
warning: txs could be replicated to mainnet costing ETHBuilder API & MEV-Boost discussion
Latest What’s New in Eth2
Proposer boost upgrade to mitigate attacks involving delayed publishing of blocks & attestations:
Activation/exit queue rate-limit increased to 5 each epoch after reaching 327,680 active validators
Visualization of staking pools, open source analytics of known pools
Vitalik: simplified version of single secret leader election (SSLE) using size-2 swaps, less perfect guarantees but much simpler
PoW switch off (the merge)
clientdiversity.org: dashboard with consensus & execution client distribution;
Reminder: execution client diversity also required
Currently Prysm at 56% and Geth at 87%
EthereumJS client (with Lodestar) proposed a block on Kiln testnet
Transaction fees can be stolen if you don’t run your own staking nodes
EIPs/Standards
EIP4974: Experience (EXP) token standard
EIP4972: Name Owned Account
EIP4966: Non-Transferable NFTs (Soulbound Tokens)
Layer2
Arbitrum Nitro devnet: fraud prover using core Geth on WASM, calldata compression, code uses Business Source License; Twitter faucet
Polynya: rollup types, regular, immutable, enshrined and sovereign
This newsletter is made possible thanks to Starbloom Ventures!
Starbloom Ventures is an early-stage venture fund founded by Evan Van Ness to invest in the future of web3.
What’s missing in DeFi? How about non-correlated assets - coming soon™️ via Rysk’s dynamic hedging options AMM
Stuff for developers
Foundry fork mode test traces decoded using source/ABI from Etherscan
Experiment with EIP3540 EVM Object Format using EthereumJS
Formal verification of BokkyPooBah's DateTime library
StreamPie: tokenized Sablier stream that token holders can RageStream to fork their own pro-rata Sablier stream
Bit twiddling techniques in Solidity, applied to tic-tac-toe game
solvm: stripped down EVM implemented using Yul & Solidity
Trustus: provide contracts with off-chain data from trusted servers
EVM draw contract: draws bytes of a contract for overview of its shape
GateRepo: ERC20 token gated private GitHub repositories
Deep dive into web3.py internals: JSON-RPC round trips
Echidna v2.0.1: adds Foundry support, bug fixes
OpenZeppelin Contracts for Cairo v0.1.0: account abstraction, ERC20 & ERC721 implementations, Ownable, Pausable, SafeMath and Proxy
GitPOAP: POAPs for contributing to open source
Security
Inverse Finance $15.6 million exploit, price oracle manipulation due to TWAP with short window
Starstream exploit on Metis Andromeda Layer 2, public execution function allowed Stars tokens to be drained from the treasury
Convex Finance vulnerability disclosed, multi-sig owners could potentially gain control of staked LP tokens, $15 billion was at risk, patched
Ecosystem
Tim Beiko’s roadmap FAQ covering the merge, withdrawals & sharding
Fake revoke approvals site used to get holders to approve NFTs
VaynerSports: $8 million in NFT sales but $26 million spent on gas, record 106 ETH burnt in one block by EIP1559
EF’s client incentive program updated with technical details
Enterprise
Proof of concept usage of Baseline pattern at European Investment Fund
Application layer
Umbra (stealth address payments) live on Arbitrum & Optimism
Index Coop icETH: leverage liquid staking using Set Protocol & Aave
Gem (NFT marketplace aggregator): adds listing analytics, filter by traits/price/rarity
Pando applies to onboard solar loans with Maker
Curve wars: Luna and FRAX propose 4pool (UST, FRAX, USDC & USDT) in attempt to undercut DAI’s spot in 3pool (USDT, USDC & DAI)
Gradual Dutch Auctions: sell tokens without liquid markets, discrete GDA for selling NFTs & continuous GDA for selling fungible tokens
veDAO announces plans to bring Solidly v2 to Optimism
Job Listings
EF ecosystem support hiring for Communications, Analyst & Admin Assistant
Hifi is hiring a Senior Solidity Engineer & Community/Social Media Manager
EF’s Privacy & Scaling Explorations team: Technical Project Coordinator, ZKP Security Engineer, L2 Security Engineer & Marketing Ops Manager
EF hiring Test Engineer to improve testing infrastructure & coverage
Devcon needs a front-end web developer
SideShift.ai is hiring a Solidity Engineer. Good job!
Reach developers experienced with Ethereum. $600 for four issues (~75 character limit), payable in ETH/DAI/USDC to abcoathup.eth on mainnet, Arbitrum or Optimism. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail
Regulation/business/tokens
UK government plans: regulate stablecoins for payment use, legislate financial market infrastructure sandbox & explore tax treatment of DeFi loans and make UK a global crypto hub
US SEC Chair: potential areas for regulation, protect retail traders, work with CFTC, separate exchange & custody and separate market making
Worldpay to allow merchants to receive settlement in USDC
Wyre acquired by Bolt for $1.5 billion
Christine Kim (Galaxy Digital Research): what to expect from the merge
General
Contribute to Semaphore’s trusted setup ceremony
Trezor users targeted in phishing attacks after MailChimp compromised
Jameson Lopp: how to backup a seed phrase
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-april-9-2022
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
Apr 18-25 – Devconnect (Amsterdam)
Apr 22 – deadline for EF academic grants round
Apr 22-24 – ETHAmsterdam
May 3-5 – Spaghett ETH (Milan)
May 6-27 – ETH Global Hack Money
May 17-20 – EY Global blockchain summit
May 20 – US Fed CBDC discussion paper feedback deadline
Jun 10-12 – ETHPrague
Jun 20-23 – NFT.NYC
Jun 24-26 – ETH NYC
Jul 8 – ETH Seattle summit
Jul 19-21 – EthCC 5 (Paris)
Aug 19-21 – ETHMexicoCity
Aug 27-28 – DeFi Security Summit (Stanford)
Aug 29-31 – Science of Blockchain Conference (Stanford)
Sep 1-4 – ETHWarsaw (hackathon & conference)
Sep 6-9 – MCON 2 (Denver)
Sep 12-14 – DappCon (Berlin)
Oct 11-14 – Devcon 6 (Bogotá)
Nov 4-6 – ETHSanFrancisco
Dec 1-4 – ETHDownUnder (Sydney)
Dec 2-4 – ETHTaipei
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