Week in Ethereum News, Feb 7, 2021 - this issue made possible thanks to Chainlink!
Eth News and Links
Eth1
Latest core devs call. Beiko’s notes: ephemeral yolov3 testnet launched, Berlin testnet tentatively Feb 24, aiming at Berlin fork in late q1/early q2, eth/66 discussion, EVM384/precompile discussion
A call for devs interested in light clients and stateless Ethereum
Eth2
Workshop video for merging mainnet with proof of stake as well as data shards
Afri benchmarks the eth2 clients. Headline: “I would consider all of them production-ready”
Staked got slashed from running redundancies. Never run two machines with same staking key and never disable slashing protection!
Spectroscope: eth2 node monitoring tool
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Stuff for developers
OpenZeppelin Contracts v3.4: erc777 security fix, virtual view functions, erc20 permit, beacon proxy, minimal proxy
Latest Truffle releases add lots of Vyper support/features
Vertigo v1.3, mutation testing framework now works with Hardhat
Latest vscode solidity adds "import" autocomplete support
App storage pattern for state variables in Solidity
Austin Griffith’s flash loans intro
Security/incidents
yearn got hacked via flashloans depegging oracle for 11m DAI, yearn stopped it while in progress and saved ~70% of the DAI. Some safeguard shields had been lowered to encourage moving to v2. A walkthrough of the attack
Dedaub finds a DeFlast vulnerability by decompiling the closed source code and finding it lacked safeguards
Artifact minting exploit via randomness in Dark Forest game
Petty: what is a security audit and how should you prep for it?
Writing your code properties with Scribble
ArmorFi massive bug bounty pays off as Alexander Schlindwein found a vulnerability and got a (mostly vested) 7 figure payout
Echidna v1.6.1, Eth code fuzzer now allows using compiler metadata to detect which contracts are deployed and performance optimizations for reverts
Ecosystem
Ethereum crossed 1 billion transactions this week
Gasnow.org adds historical data on gas price for the last week by hour/day
Micah Zoltu: how Eth governance functions
Noyes: what is MEV, how much is there, where are we now and tomorrow, and 1559 helps mitigate it
epheph’s MEV of the week. Another example of the Flashbots tools
Umbra stealth payments aiming to be on mainnet in a couple months
Enterprise
In early 2022, Visa to issue a card for businesses to transact directly in USDC. I checked: ~99% of USDC is on Ethereum.
EY and BSN partnering to deliver its Ethereum OpsChain product in China
EEA’s dev tool survey results
IBM Blockchain cut to zero. Never bet against Ethereum.
Application layer
Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda is selling a crypto art NFT on Zora
Gas fees are high, Uniswap still at record number of traders
Short Bitcoin without having to short Bitcoin: short Bitcoin dominance on UMA
Balancer v2 in next few months, currently being audited: uses less gas, customizable AMM logic, better capital efficiency. Single vault holds all assets in Balancer
Balancer is partially reimbursing gas costs in select pools for users of its UI
Nexus Mutual can now invest the mutual’s funds
APwine, tokenized future yield for Aave and Curve
Long dated options: Primitive says their September dated options are longest in Defi
ever.eth: Everest’s onchain directory of individual and entity KYC/data, where each record gets a subdomain
autem.eth: a minimal wills and trusts app via dead man switch
Regulation/business/tokens
Grayscale’s Ethereum valuation thesis: ETH as money, ETH as consumable commodity, ETH as interest bearing asset
CME’s ETH futures goes live in a few minutes at 6pm EST
General
Status compares what messengers can really see. All the “private” messengers aren’t private.
Attacking OSS using abandoned resources
Brave at 25m MAUs, more than doubling in a year
Chrome/Chromium 0day found. Immediately update your browser
Job Listing
Showtime, the NFT social network, is hiring for a founding engineer
Pocket is hiring a developer growth lead to supercharge dev adoption ←apply
Trail of Bits is looking for a technical editor/writer & security engineer
0x looking for devs of all types and a data analyst
Reddit: Senior backend/Ethereum engineer
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Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-feb-7-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
Feb 7 - CME launches ETH futures
Feb 9 - Stateless Ethereum call
Mar 5 - Financial Cryptography DeFi academic workshop
May 14 - papers due for WoSCA 2021
Jul 20-22 - EthCC4 (Paris)
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