Week in Ethereum News, March 4, 2023 - sponsored by Hardhat’s VSCode extension
Eth News and Links
Shapella (Shanghai + Capella) upgrade
Sepolia testnet successfully upgraded to Shapella
withdrawal-mainnet-shadowfork-2 successfully upgraded to Shapella, circuit breaker to local block building tested
Latest all core devs – execution (ACDE) call video. Notes from Tim Beiko:
Goerli testnet Shapella upgrade scheduled for March 14, 10:25 PM UTC
Mainnet Shapella upgrade ~4 weeks after Goerli (assuming no issues), date to be selected at next ACDE call
Cancun planning discussions: SSZ, EIP4788 (beacon state root in EVM), EIP2537 (BLS12-381 precompile) & removing SELFDESTRUCT
Geth proposals to remove eth/66, pending blocks & pre-merge sync
Wallet devs: withdrawals increment account balances without transactions
Dencun (Cancun + Deneb) upgrade
KZG Ceremony:
61k+ contributors, 20k+ in the lobby, 9 days left in first general contribution period
JavaScript client implementation
SSZ breakout video call: EIP updated with metrics of Union vs normalized transaction representation
Layer 1
Execution layer client diversity: Nethermind client is over 20% of synced nodes
EF account abstraction grants round, up to $300k available, deadline March 31
Flashbots:
backrunning private transactions using multi-party computation, proof of concept
block builder running inside an SGX enclave, on Sepolia testnet
Proposal to uncouple blobs from the execution payload
Research
Proposal for simple single slot finality, synchronous dynamically available protocol plus a finality gadget
Analysis of orderflow auctions (OFAs)
For Stakers
Rocket Pool Rescue Node: fallback node for temporary access in case of emergencies or maintenance
Layer 2
Scroll zkEVM alpha testnet
Arbitrum’s proposed time boost alternative to first come first served (FCFS) transaction ordering, MEV searchers can buy up to 0.5 second boost for transactions
Jordi Baylina: provers are not the bottleneck to zk rollup scalability as they can run in parallel
Patrick McCorry: off-chain systems (Layer 3) on top of rollups
EIPs/Standards
ERCs:
ERC6596: Historical asset metadata JSON schema
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Stuff for developers
Hardhat v2.13.0: ES Modules (ESM) support and improved IR based compilation
Remix v0.31: fork mainnet/testnets/custom networks, check UUPS contracts for storage layout incompatibilities, backup files/folders, UML zooming and Remixd v0.6.12
Foundry:
forge-std v1.5.0: StdStyle for console colors/styles, left/right shown for assertion failures, ERC721 & ERC1155 deal cheats, assertEqCall and minimum gas variants of expectCall
Foundry scripts base abstract contract
Trail of Bits properties for ABDKMath64x64, ERC20 & ERC4626, use with Echidna fuzzing or Foundry unit tests
OpenZeppelin v4.8.2: fix for ERC721Consecutive incorrect balance with batch of 1
Unchecked counter: `+` user defined operator to improve readability of unchecked loops
Bit shifting and masking in assembly (Yul)
Poseidon-huff: Poseidon hash function ported to Huff
Fe (language) v0.21.0-alpha: Self type, Max/Min traits with implementations for numeric types
wagmi ABIType v0.6: adds human-readable ABI type-level & runtime parse utilities
Starter kits:
Buidl-frontend: wagmi, RainbowKit, Next.js; plus message signing, sign in with Ethereum & contract deploy
Optimism starter: wagmi, Foundry, RainbowKit & Vite; plus Optimism’s attestation station
tx2uml v1.1.0: adds value transfer diagrams
Sybil Form: sybil-resistant form using Gitcoin Passport
Tenderly Faucet: fork a network and fund addresses via the faucet
CTFs:
Curta CTF protocol live
Sussy Huff challenge
EKO2022 CTF Metaverse Supermarket solution
Damn Vulnerable DeFi v3 Unstoppable solution
Secureum RACE #15: 8 question Solidity quiz & answers
Fusion zkRollup: experimental simple rollup in Rust
Security
Analysis of exploitable contract bugs [PDF] from Code4rena contests, 80% are currently beyond existing detection tools
Counter Exploit Toolkit: upgradeable contract with arbitrary storage write access, token & ETH withdrawal, ETH deposit honeypot and token transfer from an attacker
Ecosystem
Reminder: Goerli testnet is deprecated with support until the end of the year
Devcon 7 coming to South East Asia in 2024, likely Q3/Q4. Propose a city. Dev connect later in 2023
Etherscan address display changed to default to first and last few characters
Vitalik: still more to be done to improve the user experience
Application layer
Account abstraction:
ERC4337 EntryPoint contract deployed on mainnet & Optimism, user operations are sent to a private mempool, bundlers then batch & send to EntryPoint for execution
Safe {Core}: account abstraction stack
MakerDAO declined Cogent Bank’s $100 million loan proposal
Proposal to rescue tokens sent to Aave by mistake
LlamaZip: UniswapV3 router optimized for Optimism by compressing calldata
Ethereum Attestation Service live on Arbitrum
Analysis of airdrop impact on NFT marketplaces
POAP Checkout: sell POAPs for Sybil resistance or income on mainnet & Arbitrum
Job Listings
Shell Protocol team is hiring senior Solidity devs & more, remote or Hawaii
Immutable is hiring a Principal Product Security Engineer.
Frax Finance is expanding their official core developer team. Apply here!
Request Network is hiring a Community & Communication Manager
Certora is hiring a Senior Enterprise Sales Rep.
Job listings: $600 for four issues (75 character limit), payable in ETH/DAI/USDC to abcoathup.eth on mainnet or Layer 2. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail
Regulation/business/tokens
Coinbase Crypto435 campaign to promote pro-crypto policy in US congress
Reserve Bank of Australia piloting 14 CBDC use cases
Coindesk: crypto clients suspend business with Silvergate bank
Coinbase suspending trading of Binance USD (BUSD)
Collective DAO governance library: DAO policies, programs and processes
General/crypto
LastPass attack details: keylogger installed on DevOps engineers home computer via vulnerable media software to access corporate vault
Celer: benchmark of SHA-256 on SNARK/STARK circuit development frameworks using metrics of proof generation time, peak memory usage and CPU utilization
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Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-march-4-2023
Upcoming Dates of Note
(new/changes in bold)
Mar 10-29 – Scaling Ethereum (ETHGlobal) virtual
Mar 11 – Ethereum Guatemala
Mar 14 – Goerli testnet upgrades to Shapella
Mar 15-16 – ETHDubai
Mar 16-18 – ETH Porto
Mar 28-30 – Ethereum Rio
Mar 31 - Apr 2 – ETHSamba (Rio) hackathon & conference
Mar 31 – deadline for EF account abstraction grants round
Apr 12-14 – NFT NYC
Apr 14-16 – ETHGlobal Tokyo
Apr 14-16 – EthereumZuri.ch conference & hackathon
Apr 21-25 – EthTaipei hackathon & conference
Apr 27-30 – Istanbul ETH Privacy conference & hackathon
May 5-7 – ETHTallinn hackathon
May 9-10 – NFT Tallinn conference
May 19-23 – EDCON Montenegro (changed from Vienna)
May 20-21 – ETHDam (Amsterdam) conference & hackathon
May 24-26 – Spaghett ETH (Naples) conference
May 26-28 – ETHDublin hackathon
Jun 2-4 – ETH Seoul
Jun 2-6 – ETH Belgrade conference & hackathon
Jun 9-11 – ETHPrague conference & hackathon
Jun 23–25 – ETHGlobal Toronto
Jul 5-7 – ETHBarcelona
Jul 17-20 – EthCC (Paris)
Jul 21–23 – ETHGlobal Paris
Aug 16-19 – Ethereum Argentina (Buenos Aires)
Aug 30 - Sep 3 – ETHWarsaw conference & hackathon
Sep 10-12 – Ethereum Singapore hackathon & conference
Sep 22–24 – ETHGlobal New York
Oct 6–25 – ETHOnline (ETHGlobal) virtual
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