Week in Ethereum News, March 21, 2021. This issue made possible thanks to Trail of Bits!
Eth News and Links
Mainnet
Proposal to prioritize turning off PoW
Latest core devs call. Beiko’s notes: London upgrade fork will be 1559 and 3404 (mostly removing gas refunds). Turning off PoW preferred for the q4 2021 upgrade fork.
Turbogeth latest alpha release is Berlin ready
New bugfix client releases for Berlin upgrade fork: Besu v21.1.2, OpenEthereum v3.2.1
MiMC hashing using EVM384. Lower gas cost than Circom, might need a setup mechanism to deal with Montgomery multiplication quirks
Lakshman’s state size management explainer as to why verkle trees and epochal state expiry is currently the plan
EIPs/Standards
EIP3382: hardcoded gas limit
EIP3404: overhaul SLOAD/SSTORE costs and refunds
EIP3403: remove gas refund except when changing SSTORE value to 0
Proof of Stake
Weak subjectivity checkpoint explainer, how this enables fast PoS sync
Long-term plan to upgrade to Casper CBC, possibly needing faster crypto
Request for security and testing proposals. Deadline April 20
Single secret leader election explainer - keep the block producer secret to thwart attacks
Lodestar’s plan to become an eth2 light client in your browser
Stakers: remember to update your nodes for the Berlin fork upgrade (no link)
Layer2
zkmoney: Aztec launches zk-zkrollup with private transactions, currently with a 1 ETH transaction cap. More on the zk-zk architecture with TurboPLONK
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Stuff for developers
WalletConnect v1.4, dynamic registry for mobile linking, 80kb modal
Fork of Maker’s multicall, fast batched rpc calls for your dapp, 1 line of code integration
Integrate ENS with
ReverseRecord
to return multiple ENS names in a function callFundamentals of gas tokens (until London fork renders them useless)
Tutorial on building an AMM using StarkWare’s Cairo language
Restoring a buggy “this artwork is always on sale” by selling it to a new contract
Sign of the times: guides to create and deploy an NFT from OpenZeppelin and Quiknode
Security/incidents
Cream and Pancake victim of a DNS hijacking
Ecosystem
MetaMask v9.2 adds multiple hardware wallet acounts
DuneAnalytics v2, much faster and auto refresh
Flashbots now have 12% of hashpower, bundle simulation now in ethers and web3py
Rescuing tokens in a compromised account using Flashbots
Quantifying realized extractable value, an MEV framework
Attacking the attackers: tricky ERC20 reaps 130 ETH from sandwich attackers and sandwich attackers are sandwiching sandwichers
Enterprise
Gartner Supply Chain Breakthrough of the Year award: Microsoft’s e2e item tracability solution built on Ethereum
Meitu buys a second round of $22m in ETH and $18m in BTC
Application layer
Sotheby’s to auction Archillect/Murat Pak artwork
MetaKovan drops pseudonymity, funds five $100k scholarships for storytellers
Patrick Mahomes sells NFTs, following Gronk making almost 2m
Mark Cuban to sell MavPunks, Charmin is selling NFT(P)
Mandalas: autogenerated bitmaps on bonding curve; no backend, it’s all onchain (I bought one)
Showtime: a museum/social layer for NFT cryptoart
USDC tops 10b, Maker with a proposal to raise ETH debt ceiling from 2.5b to 15b
Regulation/business/tokens
FATF aims to kill DeFi with insanely restrictive AML guidance
Bank of America: DeFi is more disruptive than Bitcoin
Reef calls out FTX/Alameda for a token flip deal gone bad. Rekt sides with Reef
Tyler Cowen: the NFT craze makes sense
Justin Drake’s Eth as ultrasound Money meme continues to pick up steam as fee burning should exceed issuance
Vlad Zamfir sues over rights to the Casper name
General
Vitalik’s “how bulletproof-style polynomial commitments work” visual explainer
Nvidia driver update accidentally unlocked RTX3060 for Eth mining
Honeybee: speed up Intel Processor Trace for faster coverage-guided fuzzing
Phone numbers in crypto considered harmful: a hacker got all my text messages for $16
Job Listings
ethereum.org is hiring a front end dev
Building blockchains with ChainSafe. Join us! Rust, Golang, Solidity, TS
Junior devs: Nethermind is looking for junior Solidity, data analysts, nodeJs devs
Nomic Labs is hiring a senior dev and an engineering manager
New DeFi protocol Tokemak seeks Solidity and Frontend devs. Attractive comp
Powerloom Protocol is looking for Distributed Systems Engineers in Bangalore
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Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-march-21-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
Mar 25 - Gitcoin CLR matching grants round ends (ahem: Week in Eth News)
Mar 27 - Ethstaker’s “learn to stake” workshop
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 20 - deadline for beacon chain security and testing RFP
April 22 - Ethereum in the Enterprise 2021
May 14 - papers due for WoSCA 2021
Jul 20-22 - EthCC4 (Paris)
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