Week in Ethereum News, December 30, 2023

and

Dec 29, 2023

Eth News and Links

Dencun (Cancun + Deneb) upgrade (meta EIP7569)

No core devs call this week, next all core devs - execution (ACDE) call January 4

Centralization watch: threatening the value of your ETH

🚨 Lido at 31.62% is far too close to 33.3% threshold
Client diversity (via clientdiversity.org):
- Execution layer: Geth ~84% supermajority, could possibly cause a chain split
- Consensus layer: Prysm 41%, any client bug over 33.3% could mean loss of finality
Better geographic diversity is optimal, particularly outside of North America & Europe

Research

Vitalik’s Proof of Stake simplification proposal, 3 approaches to cap signatures to 8192 per slot:
- DVT: 4096 validators with minimum 4096 ETH deposit, solo stakers join DVT pools
- Two-tiered staking: heavy layer (4096 ETH min deposit) finalizes and light layer (no min deposit) attests, heavy layer + 50% or more of online light layer to finalize a block
- Rotating participation: randomly choose 4096 active validators, incentive weight decoupled from consensus weight
Execution tickets (previously Attester-Proposer Separation): in-protocol ticket market, lottery to select beacon block proposer & attesters and lottery to select execution block proposer & attesters
Blob DA scaling overview: up to 128 blobs via 1D PeerDAS, then increase up to 256 blobs via 2D PeerDAS or full Danksharding

MEV

MEV-Boost auction model and bidding strategies (naive, adaptive, last-minute & bluff bidding) show reducing latency optimizes builders performance
Rekt: $1.3M paid to solo validator by searcher after user error adding liquidity

Layer 2

zkSync Era network issues post-mortem: safety procedure caused sequencer to wait for computed state update mismatch to be resolved

EIPs/Standards

EIPs
- EIP7581: Increase block gas target and gaslimit
ERCs (application layer):
- ERC7582: Modular accounts with delegated validation (ERC4337 extension)
- ERC7583: Inscription in smart contract
- ERC7584: Linagee Name Registrar and Ethereum Content Delivery Network
- ERC7585: MixHash and public data storage proofs

Stuff for developers

Hardhat-chai-matchers v2.0.3: adds Addressable support in withArgs & equals
Solidity memory safety: avoid scratch space between assembly blocks
xdeployer v3.0.0 (Hardhat plugin for deterministic address deployment): uses CreateX
Halmos v0.1.10 (symbolic testing): reduces memory footprint, adds match-test & match-contract options and adds timeout & error failure modes
EVMole v0.3.1 (function selector extractor): adds Rust implementation
Ethernaut CTF solutions in Foundry
Sourcify updates: containerized components, run components with custom configs and removes create2 verification

Security

Ecosystem

Onchain stats

Gas fees (via ultrasound.money): 10.0 to 177.0 gwei, with 23.4 gwei average
- Zero net issuance currently at 21.9 gwei
- 1k ETH net burn this week
ETHUSD: $2,194 - $2,431, currently $2,279
ETHBTC: currently 0.055 (Flippening at ~0.16)

Notable at app layer

Infinex (perp trading) live on Base, web2 style UX, self-custody accounts, waitlist
Aave governance v3 live, low cost voting on L2s & other chains, delegations reset

Job listings: $600 for 4 issues (75 char limit). Pay using 3cities. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail

Regulation/business/tokens

General

Redditors report Mt Gox fiat repayments to PayPal accounts
Thunder 87k ETH exploit, wallet withdrawals via session tokens from MongoDB connection URL

Follow @WeekinEthNews to find out what the most clicked links are. Follow @abcoathup and @evan_van_ness to get most of the week’s news in real time.

(new/changes in bold)

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