Week in Ethereum News, February 18, 2023 - sponsored by SpeedRunEthereum.com
Week in Ethereum News, February 18, 2023 - sponsored by SpeedRunEthereum.com
Eth News and Links
Shapella (Shanghai + Capella) upgrade
Latest all core devs - execution (ACDE) call video. Notes from Tim Beiko & Christine Kim:
Empty block handling bug found on Zhejiang testnet, since patched by Geth, doesn’t impact Sepolia testnet upgrade timeline
withdrawal-devnet-7: upgraded to Shapella with 600k validators and 360k BLS changes, only stopped finalizing for 1 epoch in a harsher setup than mainnet
withdrawal-mainnet-shadowfork-2 to test MEV-Boost
0 blob EIP4844 transactions banned for now
Discussions on SSZ in block header, CL minimal presets (test configs), standardizing transaction pool API and approach to deprecate SELFDESTRUCT
builder-specs v0.3.0: add Capella support
Dencun (Cancun + Deneb) upgrade
KZG Ceremony:
47,000+ contributors, 4000+ in the lobby, 23 days left in first general contribution period
Coinbase adds call to action to their products
Latest EIP4844 implementers call video. Notes from Terence: blobs to be decoupled from blocks
SSZ breakout video call: discussion on Union vs normalized transaction representation, plan to prototype in next 2 weeks to decide approach to take
Layer 1
Visualization of MEV-boost block flow from builder to validator via relayer
Flashbots: design for MEV-Share, users send transactions to a matchmaker to match with searchers who pay users for using their transactions
Client releases
Consensus layer:
Execution layer:
Besu v23.1.0: move to Java 17 LTS, performance improvements & Bonsai robustness
Geth v1.11.0: Shanghai upgrade support, added Pebble database as LevelDB replacement (requires resync), removed puppeth & mobile development libraries and deprecated personal RPC namespace; v1.11.1: patch for empty block processing in Shanghai upgrade
Nethermind v1.17.0: Shanghai upgrade for Sepolia testnet & performance improvements
Research
Censorship resistance using delayed reveal, forward inclusion lists or parallel auctions
For Stakers
Jim McDonald: withdrawals explainer and changing withdrawal credentials
Guide to preparing a voluntary exit message in advance of scenarios such as death or stolen/lost node
Layer 2
zkEVMs race to be first to mainnet:
zkSync Era (zkSync v2) opens project onboarding before alpha launch
Polygon zkEVM announce beta launch on March 27
Optimism delays Bedrock upgrade vote to resolve issues from bounty contest
Coinbase finally adds send & receive for ETH & DAI on Arbitrum
Patrick McCorry: decentralizing a rollup needs to ensure one honest party can send all potential decisions to the contract bridge when the system is under attack by an adversary
EF Layer 2 grants round recipients, $948k to 22 projects
EIPs/Standards
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Stuff for developers
Foundry:
forge-std v1.4.0: invariant test helpers included by default, Create2 helpers and flag to disable fallback to default public RPC
Guide to invariant testing with Foundry, example using WETH
ignore Solidity warnings with the ignored_error_codes config option
organize unit tests using a state tree
Seaport v1.3: zone checks after token transfers fix, prevent filtering native tokens & more efficient bulk listings
NFT Exponential Dutch Auction (NFTEDA) Solidity for exponential price decay
Alchemy: walk through of an account abstraction design, explains why ERC4337 is so complex
Solhint v3.4.0: adds rules for named parameters in mappings and banning console.sol & global imports
Solplate: generate boilerplate Solidity contract using Rust script
Fe language bounty challenges: two challenges added
Guide to using SMTLIB2 representation of a contract with an SMT Solver
samczsun’s ABI Tools: decode/encode transaction data
ABI Data: API to fetch & cache contract ABI’s from Etherscan
Quix NFT marketplace open sourced, Next.js/React frontend and Django backend
yGenius: connecting a knowledge base to GPT using gpt_index library
Yuga Labs Dookey Dash skill-based mint game cheats and bots
Security
Dexible $1.5m exploit, approved tokens could be transferred
dForcenet funds returned after exploiter’s IP & device info identified
Balancer Merkle Orchard logic error disclosed, $3.2m was at risk, 50 ETH bounty paid
Beanstalk logic error disclosed, $3.1m was at risk, $181k bounty paid
SCSVS v2: updated contract security checklist
Ecosystem
Half of blocks were from non-censoring relays
Enterprise
Starlight v1 zApp transpiler
Baseline Profile architecture explainer
Application layer
NFT marketplaces:
Blur airdrop caused surge in gas prices
Blur updated creator royalty policy to enforce full royalties only if OpenSea blocked
OpenSea dropped fees to zero (for an unspecified time) and made royalties optional (0.5% minimum) unless on-chain enforced, marketplaces with the same policies won’t be blocked
Overtime (sports markets) expands to Arbitrum
UMA oSnap: DAOs can execute off-chain Snapshot voting using UMA’s optimistic oracle
RabbitHole v2 (learn to earn): users complete quests & mint tradable NFTs to claim rewards
Job Listings
Certora is hiring a Senior Enterprise Sales Rep.
Cyfrin.io is hiring senior security engineers $190k-$300k.
Shell Protocol team is hiring senior Solidity devs & more, remote or Hawaii
Request Network is hiring a Community & Communication Manager
Community Lead for ethereum.org sought by Ethereum Foundation
Job listings: $600 for four issues (75 character limit), payable in ETH/DAI/USDC to abcoathup.eth on mainnet or Layer 2. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail
Regulation/business/tokens
US SEC:
Terraform Labs & Do Kwon charged with securities fraud
Paxos issued with Wells notice claiming BUSD is a security
Blockchain Association filed amicus brief for SEC claims that 9 tokens are securities in alleged insider trading lawsuit
proposal for investment advisers to custody assets only with qualified custodians, Commissioner Peirce concerned for impact on crypto
ex-NBA player Paul Pierce charged for token promotion without disclosing payment & making misleading statements
New York Department of Financial Services ordered Paxos to stop minting BUSD
Alex Pertsev remains in jail in the Netherlands, next hearing in late April
General/crypto
Zero-value token transfer phishing attacks (poison transactions)
Ordinals (Bitcoin NFTs) using Emblem Vault to trade on Ethereum via OpenSea
Apple WebKit 0-day, malicious web content could lead to arbitrary code execution
NameCheap third party email gateway was sending phishing email
Sangria: folding scheme for PLONK
Why zk-rollups are advantaged over alt-zk L1s
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.
Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-february-18-2023
Upcoming Dates of Note
(new/changes in bold)
Feb 24 - Mar 1 – ETHDenver BUIDLWeek
Feb 27 – deadline for EF academic grants round
Feb 28 – Sepolia testnet upgrades to Shapella
Mar 2-5 – ETHDenver Hackathon
Mar 10-29 – Scaling Ethereum (ETHGlobal) virtual
Mar 15-16 – ETHDubai
Mar 16-18 – ETH Porto
Mar 28-30 – Ethereum Rio
Apr 12-14 – NFT NYC
Apr 14-16 – ETHGlobal Tokyo
Apr 14-16 – ETHZurich conference & hackathon
Apr 21-25 – EthTaipei hackathon & conference
Apr 27-30 – Istanbul ETH Privacy conference & hackathon
May 5-7 – ETHMalaysia conference & hackathon
May 5-7 – ETHTallinn hackathon
May 9-10 – NFT Tallinn conference
May 19-23 – EDCON Montenegro (changed from Vienna)
May 20-21 – ETHDam (Amsterdam) conference & hackathon
May 24-26 – Spaghett ETH (Naples) conference
May 26–28 – ETHGlobal Istanbul
Jun 2-4 – ETH Seoul
Jun 23–25 – ETHGlobal Toronto
Jul 5-7 – ETHBarcelona
Jul 17-20 – EthCC (Paris)
Jul 21–23 – ETHGlobal Paris
Aug 16-19 – Ethereum Argentina (Buenos Aires)
Sep 22–24 – ETHGlobal New York
Oct 6–25 – ETHOnline (ETHGlobal) virtual
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