Week in Ethereum News, Feb 22, 2021 - this issue made possible by Trail of Bits!
ETH2k was my favorite videogame
Eth News and Links
Mainnet
Latest core devs call. Beiko’s notes, discussion of what is needed to turn off PoW
List of EVM features possibly worth deleting. Let’s rip the bandaids off, turning off PoW (“the merge”) is the opportunity
Anyone want to become an EIP editor?
EthereumJS’s Typescript EVM release with critical bugfixes
Micah Zoltu’s argument for adding BLS precompile in London fork
London fork with EIP1559 scheduled for July, when the difficulty bomb starts to go off
Understanding how EIP1559 helps congestion control
Proof of Stake
eth proof of stake date to slot converter
New Lighthouse release will help head/target attestations for whole network, so if you’re running Lighthouse, please upgrade!
Withdrawal credentials merged, should enable trustless staking pools
Layer2
Celer’s cBridge, a cross-layer2 network for cheap, instant value transfers on EVM chains. Production ready, UI coming.
layer2.finance: pool layer2 transactions from many users into a single transaction using Celer’s State Guardian Network for the rollup, coming in a month or two.
Loopring’s rollup dex hasn’t been around long, has already done 500m USD, and is now doing $30m a day
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Stuff for developers
Defi Simulation with Tenderly, spin up instant forks and manipulate the state/blockheight to simulate transactions
Prysmatic: finding an elusive bug where database calls were inperformant on startup
Infura: why use Infura Transactions instead of your own in-house relayer
Security/incidents
Samsun found bug in hashmasks sale, could have re-entrancy minted thousands of hashmasks
Primitive Finance found a bug related to infinite approvals and rescued most funds
Immunefi advocates for a scaling bug bounty
Malicious Hardhat npm package on hardhat-waffle instead of @nomiclabs/hardhat-waffle. Hardhat has now squatted relevant package names. Beware of trusted code!
Use strong Fiat-Shamir transformation and be careful when implementing snarks
Reviews DAO: peer audits via barter
Ecosystem
Nvidia is introducing an Ethereum ASIC miner
Why miners can be simultaneously paid too much and yet struggling to survive: miners as a group are overpaid yet individual miners are barely breaking even
Enterprise
Christie’s to auction a Beeple NFT, it’s first purely digital art auction. It will also accept ETH for payment.
Dubai government free trade zone will now accept ETH, BTC, and Tether
Expo IDE puts some of its treasury into ETH. The devs know.
Application layer
NyanCat creator sells NyanCat NFT for 300 ETH (~$600k) on Foundation
Rai is live on mainnet. An Eth-collateralized asset with a reflexive self-peg set by interest rates
Ideamarket on mainnet: bonding curves for Twitter accounts.
uniswap over 100b lifetime volume
PoolTogether incentivizes deposits to their no-loss lottery with the POOL governance token. Deposits have skyrocketed ~100x
Ribbon finance is on mainnet with a strangle option strategy - an aggregator of Hegic and Opyn
Regulation/business/tokens
Vitalik reflects on his post-election nTrump stacking
Rekt.news says cryptoart is art: lots of money laundering
General
RFP for a full verification of the Pickles SNARK on Ethereum
Apple takes steps to thwart M1 Mac “Silver Sparrow” malware
Robinhood announces it will enable deposits and withdrawals for crypto
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Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-feb-22-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
Feb 28 - Nimbus Grafana dashboard submissions due
Mar 1-5 - Ethereum Foundation’s Ecosystem Support Program office hours
Mar 5 - Financial Cryptography DeFi academic workshop
Mar 19-21 - ETHGlobal’s NFT Hack
Apr 9 - May 14 - ETHGlobal’s Scaling Ethereum hackathon
April 14 - Berlin upgrade fork (testnets: Ropsten Mar 10, Goerli Mar 17, Rinkeby Mar 24)
May 14 - papers due for WoSCA 2021
Jul 20-22 - EthCC4 (Paris)
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