Week in Ethereum News, Aug 2, 2020, thanks to Celer!
Number go down. Number go up. Arsenal lifts the cup.
Eth News and Links
Eth1
Turbogeth public alpha - full sync in 2 days, 650 gigs disk space
Geth v1.9.18 bugfix release
A backrunning patch has been merged and is scheduled for Geth v1.9.19
Eth2
Validator launchpad released - the interface for eth2 stakers which is being tested now for the Aug 4 Medalla testnet launch
Ben Edgington’s writeup of the genesis process of Eth2’s Beacon Chain
Strategies for protecting validator keys
If you’re looking for help with validating on Medalla, join the eth2 staker discord
EIPs/Standards
Crypto
Microsoft’s Spartan: fast SNARKs without trusted setup
IBM completes successful field trials on Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Layer2
Wow! Some impressive Reddit Scaling Bakeoff submissions from layer2 (in order of submission): Starkware, Matic, OMG Network, Fuel Labs, Raiden, Arbitrum, Aztec, MatterLabs, Abridged/Kchannels, Hubble Project, Celer
Also check out Connext’s submission on using channels between rollups
This newsletter is made possible thanks to Celer Network!
Celer is a coherent layer-2 scaling platform on Ethereum. Their submission to Reddit Great Scaling Bakeoff talks about their in-production matching uses cases, why they believe state channel offers the right tradeoffs for the use cases and performance benchmarks. They also propose the concept of Layer-2 LEGO to have multiple different layer-2 techniques working together to address all current and future use cases in a coherent way.
Stuff for developers
Solidity v0.7 breaking release with lots of backwards-incompatible syntax and semantics changes
Truffle v5.1.37 adds syntax highlighting for Solidity v0.7
hevm adds symbolic execution features and a tutorial for using them
Academic paper benchmarking Eth security analysis tools
EthCode plugin for VSCode had a new release
Building an encrypted to-do list with 3Box tutorial
Fairmint opensources its linear bonding curve code
any.sender fast and cheap transaction relayer API now has zero gas overhead and a library for unit testing
Loredana’s decentralized spreadsheets demo in her lisp-like language, Taylor
How to create a Defi dashboard with TheGraph and GoogleSheets
Paul Berg’s Solidity template for his favorite toolstack: Buidler + Typechain + Ethers + Waffle + Solhint + Solcover
Ecosystem
This week we celebrated 5 years since the mainnet genesis block
Miners pushed the block gas limit to 12.5m, so Eth’s max throughput is now 45 transactions per second. Barnabé’s analysis is that the gaslimit increase did not lower gas prices
Ethereum has a 54 day streak of more transaction fees than Bitcoin
Check out this very cool txstreet transaction visualizer
A simple and easy interface to cancel pending transactions
Ethereum.org is now available in 30 languages
Enterprise
Videos from the EEA’s Ethereum in the Enterprise conference
Securing enterprise chains with Luna HSMs and PegaSysPlus v1.2
Hyperledger Besu v1.5.1
Application layer
Augur v2 launched and then relaunched with no more GSN/new account fee. If you want to support this newsletter, this is an affiliate link
Aave revamping its token model; migrating LEND to AAVE to govern the protocol; adding stakers for safety
How to protect yourself against hacks with Nexus Mutual
YFI and forks had quite a week: a fork called YFII catching fire in China before getting removed from the Balancer UI, YFI started farming YFII and dumping it, and then a different fork (YYFI) was a scam where the owner drained the Balancer pool
dForce is back doing a similar yield aggregation
MakerDAO hit 1 billion USD in value locked up
Tokens/Business/Regulation
What if Eth had EIP1559 when the network launched?
Coinbase is adding 2% a year rewards to holding DAI with them
How ArCoin got SEC permission to do a treasury fund on Eth
1inch’s Chi gastoken: how to hedge against gas prices
ResearchCoin is live to be earned (minted in future) where you earn tokens for uploading, summarizing and discussing scientific research
Sign of the times: flippening.watch returns
General
Identity index: standard for creating a unified, decentralized identity-centric resource index
TheGraph launches incentivized testnet
Ledger data breach: 1 million emails and 9500 physical addresses
3 kids arrested for hacking Twitter and taking over accounts a couple weeks ago
ETC got 51% attacked again and the price went up
Job Listings
Trail of Bits is looking for: blockchain security engineer & cryptography analyst
0x is looking for all kinds of devs: full-stack, back-end, and front-end
Celer Network: Android developer
Join one of the fastest-growing teams in blockchain: 19+ open roles at Chainlink
Want your job listing here? $250 per line (~75 character limit including spaces), payable in ETH/DAI/USDC to evan.ethereum.eth. Questions? thecryptonewspodcast at-gmail
Watch this space
If you want to follow me on Twitter, I got @evan_van_ness back after being suspended for a week for no reason, but after 3 weeks @WeekInEthNews is still suspended for the crime of (checks notes) trying to upload a profile picture. Twitter is truly the most shamelessly incompetent company.
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Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
Aug 2 - ENS grace period begins to end
Aug 4 - Medalla Eth2 testnet launch viewing party
Aug 9-11 - EDCON
Aug 28-29 - Chainlink’s Smart Contract Virtual Summit
Oct 2-30 - EthOnline hackathon
Nov 6-7 - virtual Trufflecon