Week in Ethereum News, December 4, 2021 - thanks to NEAR for making this issue possible!
Eth News and Links
Mainnet execution layer
Update your nodes for Arrow Glacier upgrade
Tim Beiko’s core devs update:
Kintsugi on devnet-2, long lived devnet planned for mid December
Deep dive into EIP4488 to make rollups cheaper by reducing calldata costs
Erigon v2021.12.01: transaction pool price bump enabled, consistent with Geth, bump priority fee & max fee by 10%+ to replace transaction
Nethermind v1.12.1: hotfix for CLI & HealthChecksUI issues after .NET 6 upgrade
EIP4488 1MB block calldata limit analysis, 67 blocks have exceeded the proposed limit, 65 of 67 were from StarkWare experiment
Verkle tree structure explainer, shallower trees and smaller proofs
Impact of address space compression proposal (20 byte address: 4 byte prefix, 2 byte period & 14 byte hash), loses address collision resistance
EIPs/Standards
Proof of Stake consensus layer
Help test PoW switch off in the weekly devnets
Beacon chain first birthday, 263k validators, $40 billion staked
Latest What’s New in Eth2:
Ben’s annotated spec updated for Altair
Work in progress Upgrading Ethereum book
PoS implementers call. Notes from Ben Edgington: 5 consensus clients working with Geth to follow chain on Kintsugi devnet-2
Kintsugi spec v3
Prysm v2.0.4: fix to alleviate bandwidth usage
Lido (staking pool) node and validator metrics report [PDF]: 38% Prysm vs 59% network-wide average
Flashbots PoS working group for development & adoption of an MEV solution post PoW switch off
Layer2
StarkNet Alpha live on mainnet, supports general computation & composability, no transaction fees until fee mechanism introduced
Discussion on resolving StarkNet DDoS vector: reverted transactions aren’t included and hence don’t pay fees
zkSync fiat onramp via Ramp, just in time for Gitcoin grants round 12
ZKOPRU: optimistic rollup using zk proofs to make transfers private, live on testnet
This newsletter is made possible thanks to NEAR!
NEAR has launched Simple Nightshade sharding to pave the way for greater throughput as NEAR reached 50 million transactions this week!
Simple Nightshade has four different state shards. For devs and users, it’s important to note that NEAR treats cross-contract calls the same regardless of whether two contracts are on the same shard.
Early in 2022, phase 1 will introduce chunk-only producers, who only validate one shard and allow for further decentralization via more validators. Full Nightshade is scheduled for q3 2022 and will feature full sharding of both state and processing.
Learn more about what’s going on in NEAR in the community-driven NEARweek newsletter.
Stuff for developers
Tim Beiko’s impact of PoW switch off on application layer:
Mining & ommer block fields set to zero equivalent
BLOCKHASH opcode changes to weaker pseudorandomness, DIFFICULTY opcode renamed RANDOM
Block time in PoS is every 12 seconds except when a slot is missed (<1% of the time)
Safe head block expected to be in canonical chain, finalized block has been accepted as canonical by >2/3 of validators
Ethers.js v5.5.2: adds Arbitrum & Optimism to networks/providers
Hardhat VSCode extension signup for private beta
Vyper v0.3.1: immutable variables, uint8 type, checkable raw_call
Fe v0.11.0 alpha, Rust like modules, functions on structs, clearer array syntax
evm-codes: interactive reference to EVM opcodes, includes gas costs, examples and playground
Using SMTChecker formal verification module in Solidity compiler with Remix & Dapptools
Slither used to detect missing withdrawal functionality in Wizard & Dragons contract
Send message from StarkNet Alpha to mainnet
keccak256-circom: experimental implementation of Keccak256 hash function in circom circuit
Monero Ethereum atomic swap work in progress prototype
Ephemeral networks cause issues with deployment systems & MetaMask caching, possible solutions: random chain id or new identifier
Security
BadgerDAO ~$120 million exploit via token approvals from apparent compromised front end, contracts now paused, check token approvals
MonoX ~$31 million exploit on Ethereum and Polygon, pool drained via price manipulation of projects token
Visor Finance user pool & test pools exploited, spot price manipulation, user funds reimbursed from treasury
0xhabitat team’s Gnosis Safe drained, phishing attack got multisig owners to sign malicious transactions
dYdX ~$2 million was at risk, contract vulnerability with set allowances used for deposit, funds rescued in partnership with samczsun
Ecosystem
Vitalik’s updated Ethereum roadmap diagram: PoW switch off, rollup scaling via sharding, statelessness, purge of historical data & tech debt, plus extras
Formalizing the definition of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV)
Flashbots work in progress research on cross-domain MEV
Enterprise
Budweiser US changed Twitter name to beer.eth and sold 1936 beer can NFTs for fiat and crypto, with flat $75 fee for minting
Skiff decentralized document collaboration adds login with MetaMask
Adidas changes Twitter profile pic to their Bored Ape
Application layer
Tornado Cash live on Arbitrum
Perpetual Protocol v2 live on Optimism
Lemma basis trading protocol live on Arbitrum
Premia single sided staking for call and put pools live on Arbitrum
Component Yield token compounding tool, experimental beta
DeversiFi governance token airdrop to active users, 31% in one category were filtered out as airdrop hunters
Bleeps NFTs, sounds generated on-chain from synthesizer in Yul outputting a wave file
The Signature, Simon de la Rouviere’s conceptual art NFT exploring provenance
RARA NFT RA!CE: NFT curation via like to earn
isotile: any NFT can now be added to a room
Job Listings
Ethereum Foundation: DevOps for Consensus Layer clients in lead up to merge
Trail of Bits summer internship 2022
Nethermind 1-3 month internship program
ethereum.org team are hiring a Product Designer
Reach people experienced with Ethereum. $420 for two issues (~75 character limit), payable in ETH/DAI/USDC to abcoathup.eth. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail
Regulation/business/tokens
US Treasury Secretary says FATF guidance on crypto doesn’t cover hardware wallet manufacturers, unhosted wallet providers, devs or miners who don’t take custody of funds
Public domain NFTs, community develops IP and derivatives extend NFT brand
DAO contributor compensation: combination of base compensation, bonuses and governance power
General
MyCrypto Winter returns for fourth year; security tip advent calendar
Faster PLONK verification for Halo-like proof-carrying data
Zero-knowledge blocklisting IACR paper, aggregating groth16 proofs
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-december-4-2021
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
Dec 7 – Implement on-chain governance with OpenZeppelin
Dec ~8 – Arrow Glacier upgrade block 13,773,000
Dec 9 – Polygon zk day
Dec 11 – Codeless Conduct no-code hackathon (virtual)
Dec 16 – Gitcoin Grants Round 12 ends (support Week in Eth News)
Jan 24-26 – Science of Blockchain Conference (Stanford University)
Feb 17 – Schelling Point (Denver)
Feb 18-20 – ETHDenver
Mar 28-30 – ETHDubai
Did you get forwarded this newsletter? Sign up to receive it weekly