Week in Ethereum News, March 14, 2021. This issue made possible thanks to Celer
Eth News and Links
Mainnet
Berlin upgrade fork is happening: Ropsten forked this week relatively uneventfully (found a small Besu issue). Reminder: EIPs are 2565 (lowers cost of ModExp precompile), 2718 (typed transaction envelope), 2929 (anti-DOS measure to increase gas costs for state access), and 2930 (optional access lists, mitigates some 2929 gas increases)
Update your clients! Latest Berlin-ready client releases: Besu v21.1.1, Geth v1.10.1, Nethermind v1.10.41, OpenEthereum v3.2
Restesteth (test generator) v0.1 with access lists
Why we should do verkle trees and per-epoch state expiry together
EVM object format, alternative to EVM versioning and BEGINDATA
Account abstraction via flashbots?
Vitalik’s history of ideas that never made it in: async only, automated load balancing shards, SSTORE big objects in one slot, parallel execution
EIPs/Standards
ERC3345: Call chaining standard
ERC3361: JSON-RPC method to sign Ethereum messages
EIP3369: Brick current ASICs with minor Ethash mod
EIP3368: increase block rewards
Proof of Stake (stakers: update your Ethereum mainnet clients for Berlin)
Latest proof of stake call. Notes from Alex Stokes and Ben Edgington: lots of client updates, first upgrade named Altair, new Prater devnet, improving fork choice discussion, and talk about going full proof of stake for Ethereum
Mikhail Kalinin’s spec to end proof of work in pull release form
A quick and dirty method to end PoW on an accelerated timeframe by running mainnet nodes and PoS nodes and modifying fork choice on the mainnet nodes
How exchanges get much better security than PoW chains even without finality in Casper FFG.
Latest what’s new in eth2: the rush to turn off PoW?
Layer2
Explaining StarkEx’s conditional transactions for fast withdrawals from l2 to l1
A practical example of the difference between l2 and sidechains
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Stuff for developers
OpenZeppelin Sentinel monitoring and alerting
Reimplementing Nexus Mutual’s bonding curve implementation to prevent high MCR vulnerability
Scaffold-eth and optimism starter pack
Harmony: open source transaction pool explorer
Ape Safe: preview GnosisSafe transactions from local mainnet fork
wighawag updates boilerplate for Solidity contract development
Security/incidents
Dodo hacked for 2.1m from an unprotected init
One Zerion user gets hit for $30k due to fake Balancer pool in interface, so now Zerion checks pools against Balancer code on chain
The private key got compromised to Roll’s hotwallet, with the hacker selling Roll’s portion (~$6m) of personal tokens
Ecosystem
GPUs can transcode video on Livepeer with nearly zero loss in hashpower (2 old GPUs made almost $1000 in a month?)
Vitalik: making the ecosystem more friendly to light clients
You can now backup your TornadoCash deposits onchain (but not with hardware wallets)
Enterprise
Quorum v21.1 - makes it easier to launch mainnet, new db format with lower storage and better performance
Application layer
Beeple everyday collage sells for $69.3m at Christie’s to MetaKovan
Dylan Field’s statement on selling Cryptopunk 7804 for ~$7.5m
TacoBell selling NFTs on Rarible
Aphex Twin selling NFTs on Foundation
Digging up old cryptocollectibles from a few years ago was a thing this week: Cryptocats, Mooncats, Etheria (no links)
Golem is back with a new version of Golem running on zkSync
Democracy Earth’s universal basic income for proof of humanity
Etherplay to return on a rollup
Regulation/business/tokens
Binance is being investigated by the CFTC, per Bloomberg
JP Morgan designing a basket of public equities with indirect crypto exposure
Lucius Fang’s deep dive into decentralized insurance
A protocol merger? Keep and NuCypher in discussions
Linda Xie: A beginner’s guide to DAOs
General
What your browser sends home to centralized servers about you when you first startup the browser
Malware delivered via URL due to website and adtech syncs (ahem: why you should block ads with Brave)
CVE-2021-21300: Update your git release
Job Listings
Nomic Labs is hiring a senior dev and an engineering manager
Powerloom Protocol is looking for Distributed Systems Engineers in Bangalore
Build the future with ChainSafe. Rust, Golang, Solidity, TS Devs needed!
Props: Senior Marketing Manager, Director of Finance and Marketing Intern.
DeFi hub of Polkadot - Acala is hiring Solidity, Rust and Fullstack devs.
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Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-march-14-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
Mar 19-21 - ETHGlobal’s NFT Hack
Mar 25 - Gitcoin CLR matching grants round ends (ahem: Week in Eth News)
Apr 9 - May 14 - ETHGlobal’s Scaling Ethereum hackathon
April 14 - Berlin upgrade fork (testnets: Ropsten Mar 10, Goerli Mar 17, Rinkeby Mar 24)
April 16 - Rollup community grant applications due
April 22 - Ethereum in the Enterprise 2021
May 14 - papers due for WoSCA 2021
Jul 20-22 - EthCC4 (Paris)
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