Week in Ethereum News, July 24, 2021 - thanks to Celer for making this issue possible!
Eth News and Links
Mainnet execution layer
Clients need to update after consensus issue found on Ropsten testnet, Geth included a transaction which OpenEthereum and Besu rejected; updated client versions:
Geth v1.10.6
Erigon 2021.07.04-alpha
Nethermind v1.10.79
Latest core devs call. Notes from Tim Beiko:
London upgrade date unchanged after consensus issue
gasPrice field will be set to maxFeePerGas and changes to effectiveGasPrice once mined, field to be removed next upgrade
Focus on Proof of Stake testnets post London
Naming upgrades discussion with polls
Access list transactions since Berlin upgrade: ~270k transactions, ~5% of potential gas space
Chain history storage network first draft: provides on-demand availability of historical block headers and block bodies
Storage layout proposal for state network
Proposal for EEICALL opcode to execute bytecode over given Execution Environment Interface
EIPs/Standards
Proof of stake consensus layer
Draft EIP3675: Upgrade consensus to Proof-of-Stake
Validators need to update their execution clients for the London consensus issue, validators running Prysm need to update Prysm
Lighthouse client update: focusing on Altair upgrade, doppelganger support and networking overhaul
Layer2
Reddit scaling Community Points using an Arbitrum rollup: starting with Rinkeby testnet then migrating to mainnet
Celer cBridge v1.0: instant token transfer between Ethereum, Arbitrum and selected sidechains
StarkNet Alpha 1: Layer1<>Layer2 messaging protocol and onchain data availability via state diff published to Ethereum
This newsletter is made possible thanks to Celer!
Celer cBridge v1.0 is now live on mainnet! Users are now able to use cBridge to instantly transfer tokens across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain, with many more side chain and layer-2 chain integrations planned for in the near future. Anyone can run a cBridge node to join the cBridge Network and provide cross-chain and cross-layer liquidity while generating yields through transaction fees.
Stuff for developers
Hardhat v2.5.0: Hardhat Network support for London
Brownie v1.15.0: Multicall context manager, Solidity 0.8 typed errors, EIP712 message signing, hardware wallet support, and Vyper v0.2.14
Permit Singleton: meta transaction transfers for already deployed ERC20/721/1155 tokens via a singleton contract per network
micro-eth-signer updated for London and Berlin
abi-to-sol v0.3.0: adds a web UI and improved support for older Solidity versions
Ledger plugins to parse transaction fields and build custom displays for smart contracts
Don’t use spot price as an oracle
Beginner tutorial: send transactions in React via useDapp
Security
Thorchain exploit ~$8million; call to malicious contract can drain holders RUNE
Array Finance exploit ~$500k, price manipulation drained the pool
Alex’s rescuer perspective of saving funds from a phishing scammer using an Ethereum burner and Flashbots
3 month Secureum bootcamp for smart contract auditing
Ecosystem
Georgios & Vitalik: Reorgs in Ethereum, prevention measure is to speed up Proof of Work switch off, less of an issue with Proof of Stake as attack would require large portion of validators
Flashbots Research on MEV post EIP1559
Optimism experimenting with public goods funding using sequencing profits, first experiment is retroactive public goods funding
NFT series retroactively supporting EIP1559 contributors (Disclosure: I supported)
Ashton Kutcher asks Mila Kunis about Ethereum with special guest
#ETH gains the Ethiopian flag as Twitter adds flags to 3 letter country code hashtags for the Olympics
Ethereum.org Q3 roadmap
EthCC mainstage videos
Enterprise
Bank of Korea selects GroundX for CBDC pilot with ConsenSys as technical partner
Application layer
Maker Foundation shutting down as MakerDAO is decentralized
DAppNode governance token: airdrop with 3 year claimable stream
Tweet storm list of DAOs & strategies for picking them
PartyBid: protocol to pool funds for bidding in NFT auctions
Intro to Axie Infinity and play to earn gaming model
AutographNFT: use web2 IDs such as Twitter to autograph NFTs
ZKNFT alpha: proof of concept NFT marketplace on zkSync
PawNFT on Rinkeby: NFT-collateralized lending using active auction
Run a local game of the Dark Forest
Aave planning to build Twitter alternative on Ethereum
Regulation/business/tokens
EU proposal to extend AML/CFT rules to entire crypto sector: service providers to conduct due diligence on their customers, anonymous crypto asset wallets will be prohibited
US Working Group on Financial Markets discussed stablecoins: act quickly on regulatory framework, recommendations expected in coming months
Taming wildcat stablecoins paper - Gorton (Yale) and Zhang (US Fed)
USDC reserves: 61% cash and equivalents
General
Detect NSO Group’s Pegasus phone malware, used to target activists, politicians and journalists
Security analysis of Telegram, vulnerabilities disclosed in message reordering, encrypted message detection, plaintext recovery of encrypted messages and attacker in the middle
Chrome patches 8th zero day vulnerability this year, reports of exploit in the wild
DuckDuckGo Email Protection beta: removes email trackers from @duck.com and unique private email addresses
Job Listings
🧙 Defi marketing wizard, Float.Capital seeks 🧙
Props is hiring a Front End Blockchain Engineer
Alejandro from Synthetix: smart contract engineer trainee via EthernautDAO
Nethermind internship program
Want to reach people experienced with Ethereum? List your job here. $345 per line (~75 character limit including spaces), payable in ETH (or 345 DAI or 345 USDC) to abcoathup.eth. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail
Follow @WeekinEthNews to find out what the most clicked links are. Follow @evan_van_ness and @abcoathup to get most of the week’s news in real time.
Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-july-24-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
July 25-31 - IC3 Blockchain Camp (virtual)
July 26+30 - OpenZeppelin/ITBA free course for devs in Spanish
July 30 - Sign in with Ethereum RFP deadline
August 1 - applications close for Secureum auditing bootcamp
August 4 - London hard fork
August 12 - applications close for EF small grants for events
Aug 27-29 - Edcon (Shenzhen/online)
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