Week in Ethereum News, December 8, 2019
Eth so far successfully upgrades to the Istanbul release, multi-client public Eth2 testnet, rollup wars
Eth News and Links
Eth1
So far, Instanbul has successfully forked. Here’s what is in the Istanbul upgrade and the Jan 6 delay of the difficulty increase.
The attention grabber is that Istanbul enables the layer2 rollup solutions that will reach ~3000 transactions per second
Red Queens, a new sync proposal
Geth v1.9.9 enables the Jan 6 (block 9.2m) delay of the difficulty increase
Parity v2.5.11 stable and v2.6.6 beta, an emergency pre-Istanbul release to include EIP1344 in the mainnet config file
Trinity v0.1 alpha31 emergency pre-Istanbul bugfix release
Eth2
Multi-client testnet: Parity’s Shasper joins Prysmatic’s public testnet
Etherscan launched its eth2 block explorer
Latest what’s new in Eth2.
Danny Ryan’s Eth2 update
Latest implementers call. Notes from Ben and notes from Mamy
Nethermind is now working on an eth2 client to add to its eth1 client.
The first networking call was this week. Notes from Ben and Mamy.
Latest Eth2 light client call
Inaugural edition of a monthly phase 2 call. Not recorded, but notes are here
Layer2 - begun, the rollup wars have
ZK Sync, all about Matter Labs’ ZK rollup. including a testnet with a live demo.
Advantages of validity proofs vs fraud proofs, or why Starkware prefers ZK rollup to optimistic
Stuff for developers
Blazing fast contracts testing from Open Zeppelin
JavaScript compiler/runtime for AirAssembly, a low level language for STARKs
Comprehensive overview of Eth development best practices
Why you should use EIP1167 proxies, with tutorial
Austin Griffith’s latest eth.build
Dennison Bertram converts a WebFlow template to web3 app in seconds
3Box’s edit profile plugin, a React dropin component
Tornado.cash is having a relayer contest on Kovan testnet
Next year Wyre will make it easy via meta transactions for app users to use DeFi from their debit card
A step by step guide to mutation testing your Eth code
An imitation learning fuzzer for your Eth contracts from the ETH Zurich folks
Ecosystem
Updates from the myriad of teams supported by the EF
30 days of Eth community shipping, November edition
Enterprise
EY Nightfall update - batching lowers mainnet cost of zk-enabled privacy to ~25 cents.
ConsenSys and Harry Fox Agency contracted for a modernized American music copyright database to distribute royalties.
Hyperledger Besu v1.3.6 - ready for next month’s fork to delay the difficulty increase
Quorum v2.4
Governance and standards
ERC2426: encryption for eth2 wallet/keystore
EIP2427: BLOCKHASH2 opcode
ERC2429: Secret multisig recovery
Application layer
0x v3 is live on mainnet with ZRX staking and liquidity bridges
Uniswap’s frontend banned 10 OFAC countries, but there are always decentralized frontends on IPFS
Betting on DeFi interest rates with Maple
ETHBTC relative strength index set launches
Net spread on Maker's Dai is 0. 4% Dai Savings Rate and 4% Dai Stability Fee.
DAI flipped SAI. There’s now more Dai in existence than Sai. Probably because of that 0% spread.
Brave at 10.4m monthly active users, doubling in a year.
Tokens / Business / Regulation
Liquidity pool distribution as measure of DeFi decentralization
GridPlus electricity customers can now pay their monthly bill with the GRID token.
LawCoin is tokenizing litigation funding
de la Rouviere: a survey of generative art economies
Microsoft Azure releases its Heroes NFTs (built on Enjin) to reward its contributors
General
MyCryptoWinter: an advent-style calendar of crypto security tips
Automating Attack Discovery on Blockchain Incentive Mechanisms with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Quadratic funding as public good preference aggregator
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):
Jan 1 - Augur v1 cutoff
Jan 1-30 - EthIndia online hackathon
Jan 6-20 - Gitcoin take back the web online hackathon
Jan ~6 - Hard fork to fix the difficulty bomb
Jan 31 - deadline for EU ledger 200k euro grants for blockchain startups
Feb 14-16 - ETHDenver
Mar 3-5 - EthCC (Paris)
Mar 29-Apr4 - EthLagos
Apr 3-7 - Edcon (Vienna)
If you appreciate this newsletter, thank ConsenSys
This newsletter is made possible by ConsenSys.
I own 100% Week In Ethereum. Editorial control has always been me.
If you’re wondering “why didn’t my post make it into Week in Ethereum,” then here’s a hint: don’t email me. Do put it on Reddit.
It’s amazing to me how many people email me when every issue has a link at the bottom saying not to email me to get in the newsletter.
If you're unhappy with editorial decisions or anything that I have written in this issue, feel free to tweet at me.
I want your links, because Google needs help: weekinethereumnews.com
Archive on the web if you’re linking to it: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-eth-news-december-8-2019/
Follow me on Twitter, because most of what is linked here gets tweeted first: @evan_van_ness
Did you get forwarded this newsletter? Sign up to receive the weekly email