Week in Ethereum News, March 28, 2021. This issue made possible thanks to Matcha!
Eth News and Links
Mainnet
Beiko’s summary of what’s happening in upgrade planning: Berlin live on testnets, 1559 scheduled for Jul/Aug, whether to freeze features until we turn off PoW
Proposed verkle tree scheme for Eth state
An early spec for state retrieval network
EIPs/Standards
Proof of Stake
Latest proof of stake call. Notes from Alex Stokes and Ben Edgington
Danny Ryan's Finalized update - Altair upgrade spec pre-release, the security RFP
Latest what’s new in eth2, lots of context from Ben on the things in this section
PR for a spec to turn off PoW via fork choice change
First “turn off PoW” transaction prototypes: SigmaPrime pairs with Catalyst and Aditya uses py-evm and the spec
Prater devnet launch went well
Open challenges in staggering shards for very fast block times
Ethstaker’s community call on turning off PoW with lead devs Mikhail Kalinin and Guillaume Ballet
chaind v0.3.1 to analyze beacon chain data, adds eth1 deposits, Prometheus metrics
Step by step video guides to staking at home
Layer2
Arbitrum’s mainnet release candidate, includes BLS sigs. Compatible with EVM at bytecode, so your Solidity contracts and tools work.
Hop cross-EVMchain AMM exchange to go live in April with xdai, Polygon and Arbitrum
Optimism delays launch until at least July, testnet for Scaling Ethereum hackathon in April
Zk rollup Hermez is live with ETH, HEZ, WBTC, USDT and DAI transfers
This newsletter is made possible thanks to Matcha!
Matcha aggregates liquidity across decentralized exchange networks to offer you the best price on every token swap on both spot and limit orders!
Now you can trade 1000+ DeFi tokens on Matcha!
Stuff for developers
Solidity v0.8.3 - bugfix for keccak caching in the optimizer
OpenZeppelin Contracts v0.4, SafeMath now just a wrapper, storage optimizations, GSN v2
Remix v0.11 series adds Workspaces
Latest dapptools (hevm, seth, dapp) release, eip712 signing, better fuzzing and symbolic execution
Micro eth signer fully functional 5kB (+26kB dependencies) library
Make your app GnosisSafe compatible in 5 mins
Usedapp framework from EthWorks uses ethers, web3-react, Maker’s multicall, and Waffle
Infernal simple dapp with Vue and NodeJS
Let’s find a prime using Cairo
Tutorial for Hardhat deploy
Introducing NFT flash loans
Fe dev update 4, includes uniswap v2 demo
Security/incidents
Forcing bad swaps on yield farming by manipulating the price and calling harvest
Samczsun and Tina Zhen save $4.5m from an ElasticDAO unguarded transfer function
Conkas modular static analysis tool
One year fuzzing the Solidity compiler
Ecosystem
An expansive guide to the Ethereum blockspace market
Shutter network: threshold cryptography to combat frontrunning; Goerli testnet version released soon
$4m in 2021 EF grants to support Ethereum client diversity to Besu, Geth, Nethermind, OpenEthereum, and Turbogeth
Ethereum on ARM: updated Raspberry Pi4 images for all mainnet and PoS clients
Enterprise
Spanish corporate coalition for digital identity built on Ethereum
Application layer
Uniswap v3 announced: concentrated liquidity positions for less trader slippage, fee flexibility, better oracles
Gyroscope’s incentivized testnet
Giveth relaunches with fee-free donations, and noob-friendly by using Torus
Monty Python’s John Cleese is selling an NFT drawing of the Brooklyn Bridge
Time Mag is selling its 3 “God/Truth/Fiat is dead” NFT covers. So even a NYTimes columnist is doing it
This Artwork Earns Yield, a spinoff of Simon’s always onsale art
Robin Sloan & Nick Johnson’s Amulets - NFTs minted (40k gas!) when you find short poems whose SHA256 hash contains many consecutive eights.
Regulation/business/tokens
Eth as ultrasound money, David Hoffman’s long read
Staked Eth trust, custody by Fireblocks to get exposure to staked ETH
NewYorker Beeple profile reveals he immediately sold his ETH from Christie’s payday
Public opinion period on FATF’s attempt to choke DeFi with regulations. Deadline to file a comment is April 20
General
Vitalik: legitimacy is the scarce resource
Interview with EF Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi
Aggregatable distributed keygen paper in blog post form
The SNL skit on NFTs
Job Listings
New DeFi protocol Tokemak seeks Solidity and Frontend devs. Attractive comp
Gnosis is hiring! Ethereum Core Developer, Frontend Engineer, Rust Engineer
Chainsafe is looking for a Typescript dev to work on Lodestar eth2 client
Nomic Labs (Hardhat/Buidler) is hiring a senior dev and an engineering manager
Junior devs: Nethermind is looking for junior Solidity, data analysts, nodeJs devs
Want your job listing here? $345 per line (~75 character limit including spaces), payable in ETH (or 345 DAI or 345 USDC) to evan.ethereum.eth. Questions? thecryptonewspodcast at-gmail
If you’re wondering “why didn’t my post make it into Week in Ethereum News,” then please put it on an Ethereum subreddit; emails/DMs are not part of my workflow.
Please click the following if you’re interested in sponsoring the newsletter.
Twitter: follow @WeekinEthNews to find out what the most clicked are. Follow @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-march-28-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
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 20 - deadline to comment on FATF anti-DeFi regulatory proposal
April 22 - Ethereum in the Enterprise 2021
May 14 - papers due for WoSCA 2021
Jul 20-22 - EthCC4 (Paris)
Did you get forwarded this newsletter? Sign up to receive it weekly