Week in Ethereum News, January 24, 2021 - this issue made possible thanks to Trail of Bits
Eth News and Links
Eth1
Latest core devs call. Beiko’s notes: Berlin testnet coming soon, Ice Age delay probably goes in the next 1559 fork.
Criteria for Turbogeth beta release: usable for mining, simplify block header/body downloading, Clique/POA switching, switching from LMDB database to MDBX
Latest Turbogeth weekly release adds
debug_traceCallGas cost estimates of EVM384
Why 1559? Better UX, better economics, better security.
Beiko’s state of 1559 update
Alex Stokes: 1559 is good for miners
Eth2
Danny Ryan’s state of Eth2 in Jan 2021: eth2 is Eth’s future consensus layer, next up is either turning off PoW or sharded data for rollups
Latest Lighthouse update: in-depth discussion of sharded data or turning off PoW. Leans toward turning off PoW with (an obviously tentative) goal of shipping in 12 months.
Prysm’s short-term work: more performant slasher and production ready UI
Nimbus Grafana dashboard challenge (prizes up to $5k)
Supranational’s blst library first public release, fast sigs for BLS12-381
Layer2
Fast withdrawals to mainnet on Loopring’s zk rollup
Celer has 1 million users on its state channel games
DeFi Pooling from StarkWare, a yearn-style vault on layer2 to save gas
This newsletter is made possible thanks to Trail of Bits!
Rajeev G, a security engineer with the Status project, has started providing audit report breakdowns for the benefit of less security-savvy users. His first report breakdown covers the Trail of Bits report for the Origin Dollar, which was launched without a security review and then exploited before the scheduled audit was completed. One takeaway: 7 security issues, including 3 of the highest severity, could have been found automatically with Slither.
Stuff for developers
web3js v1.3.3 - fix Metamask provider change
Fe v0.1 alpha release python-like language
Truffle-token-test-utils token transfer viz
SMTChecker and the synthesis of external functions, coming in next Solidity release
A dev’s intro to Ethereum, part 2
Security/incidents
Livepeer finds and patches logic bug
Secureum’s guide to reading audits
Ecosystem
Josh Stark: Year in Ethereum 2020
ENS’s DNS Namespace integration is live on testnet. Use your .com domain as your ENS name.
Application layer
Gasless NFT minting with Mintable
Enzyme (eg, Melon v2) live. 150 assets, lending enabled, provide liquidity, synthetics. v1 UI stays live for 3 months.
Metastable SAVE v2 is live, with tokenized stablecoin LPs
Saddle is live, a Curve fork aimed at BTC on Ethereum using virtual synths
In the tokenized BTC realm, BadgerDAO does BTC yieldfarming and this week launched a rebase BTC game called Digg
Charm options is live. No oracles, 100k cap per market right now
ArmorFinance is live: buy Nexus Mutual coverage without having to doxx yourself (KYC), plus token rewards for users
We’re over $25b total value locked per DefiPulse
Regulation/business/tokens
Coindesk: ETH to 2k
Fundstrat issues $10.5k price target for ETH
Chainalysis says the only crime on blockchains is payments for ransomware and darknet markets. Disproportionately on Bitcoin, of course
General
MyCrypto’s review of 2020’s major blockchain security incidents
Billy Rennekamp on the future (and unbundling?) of crypto wallets
Brave adds IPFS support with go-ipfs running a local node
Qin, Zhou, Gervais paper: Quantifying miner extractable value
Werner, Perez, et al, paper: DeFi Systemization of Knowledge
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Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-jan-24-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
Jan 27 - ETH JSON RPC API Standard call
Feb 5 - Nimbus Grafana challenge submissions deadline (prizes up to $5k)
Feb 5-12 - EthDenver (virtual)
Feb 8 - CME launches ETH futures
Mar 5 - Financial Cryptography DeFi academic workshop
Apr 6-8 - EthCC4 (Paris)
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