Week in Ethereum News, August 21, 2021 - thanks to Celer for making this issue possible!
Eth News and Links
Mainnet execution layer
Geth releasing hotfix on August 24 for undisclosed high severity security issue
Latest core devs call video. Notes from Tim Beiko;
London retrospective
~December upgrade for difficulty bomb delay and potentially constant tweaks for EIP1559, no new EIPs before PoW switch off
Clients focusing on PoW switch off and internal improvements
Erigon v2021.08.03: datadir parameter not backward-compatible and fix for trace_ RPC
Nethermind v1.11.0: added trace_filter and JSON RPC over IPC
Network capacity ~9% higher post London due to ice age delay, pre-London blocks not always being full and EIP1559 formula
Visualization of estimated gas price 100k blocks before and after London upgrade, less volatility means fewer weekend downswings
Node crawler alpha, drill down by client, version and operating system
EIPs/Standards
EIP3722: Poster
Proof of stake consensus layer
Lodestar (TypeScript) light client prototype: bandwidth and processing load reduced by ~99% of full client
Pyrmont testnet upgraded to Altair; Pyrmont is being deprecated and users should switch to Prater testnet
Teku v21.8.1: improved peer discovery, improved performance for load balanced beacon nodes and clearer sync progress logs
Design space of Consensus API
Using total difficulty threshold as hard fork anchor, a 7 day scheduled PoW switch off could be 4 days early
Ledger adds staking with Lido (staking pool)
Open the ports on your beacon chain nodes! Improve the network’s efficiency and reduce risk of censorship
Layer2
Optimism developer onboarding criteria, testnet regenesis ~October, ETH may no longer be ERC20 compatible, will use Solidity compiler, EOAs no longer contract wallets and decrease gas usage
1inch Network live on Optimism
Teleportr: low cost mainnet to Optimism ETH bridge, 0.02ETH limit
Boba Network is rebranded OMGX Network (optimistic rollup based on Optimism)
Protolambda tweetstorm: use execution-consensus API for rollups with minimal diff and full compatibility
Warp: EVM to Cairo (StarkNet’s smart contract language) transpiler
StarkWare's shared prover (SHARP) reduces small apps’ layer 2 costs
This newsletter is made possible thanks to Celer!
Celer Network is a layer-2 scaling platform that brings fast, secure and low-cost blockchain applications. Celer cBridge v1.0 is now live on mainnet. Users are now able to use cBridge to instantly transfer tokens across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain, with many more side chain and layer-2 chain integrations planned for in the near future. Anyone can run a cBridge node to join the cBridge Network and provide cross-chain and cross-layer liquidity while generating yields through transaction fees.
Stuff for developers
web3.js v1.5.2: removed default of transactions to Type 0
Remix IDE v0.16.2: Metamask v10.0.0+ support for type 2 transactions
OpenZeppelin Contracts v4.3: modular on-chain governance based on Compound’s GovernorAlpha/GovernorBravo and ERC interfaces
Guide to verifying a contract on Etherscan from OpenZeppelin
Hardhat difference between Hardhat Network and other configured networks
ts-essentials v8.0.0: updated for TypeScript v4
ethers-flashbots (Rust): ethers middleware to send transactions as Flashbots bundles
poseidon-tornado: Tornado Cash fork using Poseidon Hash
Typescript-eth-starter: simple Greeter smart contract on localhost and Rinkeby with React stack
Web3-Boilerplate: using RedwoodJS, Simple Wallet connector and useDapp
Lambda School developing blockchain course to convert developers to crypto developers
Security
samczsun disclosed vulnerability in SushiSwap’s Miso, ~$350million was at risk due to msg.value used in a loop via delegatecall; formal verification didn’t detect bug as formal spec missing a rule
Tally voting bug, against votes sent as for votes due to faulty boolean check in Typescript, used with Uniswap, Fei, Gitcoin, and Idle proposals
Liquid exchange had ~$90million moved from compromised warm wallets
Scammer convinced user to show MetaMask sync with mobile QR via screen share, MetaMask improved warnings not to share this QR code
Polygon denial of service vulnerability disclosed, uninitialized logic contract could be self destructed
PolyNetwork hack, ongoing Q&A with hacker
Ecosystem
MetaMask: how to set EIP1559 transaction priority video
Tally web3 wallet being developed, first release to focus on open finance
Etherscan shows green light bulb for Type 2 EIP1559 transactions
Vitalik: moving beyond coin voting governance
Enterprise
Draft Baseline standard
Microsoft Argus paper on incentive system for anti-piracy campaigns
Application layer
OpenFrontEnds DAO to create decentralized front ends for DeFi protocols
iceCream: vested, non-transferrable, non-tradeable governance tokens
Andre Cronje: liquidity mining rewards using options
Beta Finance: lend, borrow and short sell selected tokens
Proposal for power perpetuals (squeeth): perpetual derivative indexed to a power of the price of an underlying instrument such as Ether
Cryptopunk images and attributes added on-chain
NFT for biopharma research and IP rights sold to DAO to fund research
OpenSea passed Etsy in volume, $1billion for August
Regulation/business/tokens
US CFTC: ETH [is] a non-security commodity
Bloomberg: 50 years after dropping the gold standard US needs to avoid expensive mistake of restrictive regulation for crypto
Binance requiring KYC (including government ID and facial verification) for all users
Props Loyalty Program ending and stopping issuing new Props Tokens due to constraints of US Regulation A+
ImmutableX rewarding US users with ETH rather than protocol token due to US regulatory uncertainty
Bloomberg’s Studio 1.0 interview with Vitalik, includes discussion on the metaverse and skepticism for DeFi on Bitcoin
Coinbase to be first US publicly traded company to hold ETH on balance sheet
General
Chris Dixons tweet storm blockchains are the new app stores
Who owns the metaverse, terms of service of social media giants
Cory Doctorow: copyright protects creativity, not effort
Bluesky, started by Twitter to decentralize social media, being led by Jay Graber who recently advised reputation project linking Twitter to web3
T‑Mobile data breach: 7.8million postpaid, 0.8million prepaid and 40million former/prospective customers impacted
McEliece-1284 challenge broken in ~22 CPU years
Cairo architecture and how Cairo proofs are created
Cloudflare: Zero-Knowledge proofs for private web attestation with cross/multi-vendor hardware
Aggregating hash-based signatures using STARKs
Reinforced Concrete: fast hash function for ZKProofs and verifiable computation
Dogecoin Foundation reestablished with Vitalik as board advisor
Job Listings
Hiring a Front-End (or Full Stack) Engineer at Kwenta
Ethereum Foundation: Test Engineer for consensus and execution layers
Solidity is hiring a C++ dev
WalletConnect looking for Javascript/Typescript devs
Nethermind internship program
Want to reach people experienced with Ethereum? List your job here. $345 per line (~75 character limit including spaces), payable in ETH (or 345 DAI or 345 USDC) to abcoathup.eth. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail
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Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-august-21-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
Aug 24 – Geth releasing hotfix
Aug 27-29 – Edcon (online)
Sep 15-17 – MetaCartel MCON Denver
Sep 17-Oct 15 – ETHOnline hackathon
Oct 1-3 – EthAtlanta enterprise-focused hackathon & keynotes
Oct 22-24 – ETH Lisbon
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