Week in Ethereum News, May 14, 2022 - thanks to clr.fund for making this issue possible!
Eth News and Links
PoW switch off (the Merge)
Ropsten testnet upgrade to PoS estimated for June 8 (Terminal Total Difficulty 43531756765713534)
Mainnet-shadow-fork-4 merge looked perfect, Erigon had unrelated sync issues
Mainnet-shadow-fork-5 merge on May 19, equal validator split across execution & consensus layer clients
Staking safely post-Merge requires client diversity for both consensus & execution layers
Geth currently over 80% at the execution layer
Mainnet execution layer
Latest core devs call video. Notes from Tim Beiko & Christine Kim:
Mainnet-shadow-fork-4: empty blocks due to consensus clients asking for the candidate block too quickly
Ropsten to be upgraded to PoS early June with permissionless beacon chain, not using Fork ID; Sepolia beacon chain to be permissioned
Agreed on latest, finalized & safe JSON RPC block tags
EIP discussions: EIP4938 (eth/67: removal of GetNodeData) and EIP5081 (expirable transaction)
Nethermind v1.13.0: beta snap sync support, sync reduced from 24+ hours to 2 hours & download size cut from ~90GB to ~30GB
Erigon v2022.05.03-alpha: more fixes to improve snapshot download speed
Proof of Stake consensus layer
Updated consensus client diversity estimates: Prysm 48%, Lighthouse 23%, Teku 15% and Nimbus 8%
Somer’s staker migration guides: migrate from Prysm to Nimbus
Teku v22.5.0: epoch processing optimisations & fixes issue loading optimized BLST library on Windows
Lodestar v0.36.0: security fix and proposer boost enabled by default
Danksharding panel with Dankrad, Protolambda & Vitalik, moderated by Tim Beiko
Danny Ryan: Lido over 1/3 of stakers is a centralization risk
EIPs/Standards
Proposal for NFT sale of unused EIP numbers
EIP5089: Principal token
EIP5083: NFT token acceptance
EIP5081: Expirable transaction
Layer2
KuCoin supports USDC & USDT deposits on Optimism
Censorship resistant bridges
Polygon Hermez v2 deep dive
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Stuff for developers
samczsun’s Signature Database: search function, error, event & name signatures
Use optional access list to reduce gas costs reading multiple storage slots
Thirdweb-deploy: deploy contracts using MetaMask or Gnosis Safe, dashboard to view deployments
Blocknative Transaction Preview API simulate bundled transactions
Sepolia testnet faucet
OxPARC Ecne: verify ZK circuits
1inch’s cumulative merkle drop tool
Security
Chainlink minimal value circuit breaker triggered for LUNA/USD, oracle reported LUNA at $0.107, Blizz Finance (Avalanche) drained, Venus Protocol (BNB chain) $13.5 million lost from borrowing at outdated price
Balancer DoS vulnerability disclosed, double entry-point ERC20 tokens
Ecosystem
Decentralized Society (DeSoc): ecosystem of accounts (Souls) holding revocable soulbound (non-transferrable) tokens for social identity, with community recovery
Wallet devs call notes: discussions on batch/bundled transactions endpoint, support multiple wallet extensions and cross-wallet testing
Ads on crypto websites such as Etherscan & Coingecko used in token approval attack
Enterprise
Instagram testing sharing NFTs with selected creators & collectors
Amazon Managed Blockchain supports running Goerli testnet nodes
KFC Malaysia sending promo codes via Etherscan’s Blockscan Chat
EY Blockchain Analyzer Reconciler: import enterprise records, reconcile off-chain records with on-chain transactions and track wallet balances
S&P Global gave Compound Treasury B- credit rating
Application layer
Maker vault used to finance Australian beef shipment
Bancor v3: single-sided staking, impermanent loss protection, dual rewards, auto-compounding rewards, and composable single-sided pool tokens
Sushi live on Optimism
Element Finance open sourced research [Disclosure: Evan is advisor]
Backed (NFT-backed loans) live on Optimism
Gnosis Safe Transaction Simulation in transaction builder
Karma: delegate from DAO contributor reputation leaderboard; [Disclosure: Starbloom portfolio]
Hop using Sybil hunters to find Sybil airdrop attackers
Reminder to check ENS expiry dates
ETHPass: token gated events with tickets in Apple Wallet/Google Pay, scanning tickets can autoclaim POAPs
Huddle01: token gated video calls live; beta
Headline: decentralized publishing & newsletter platform
OpenSea updated account verification and collection badging system
Job Listings
Status Waku is hiring: Software & DevRel Engineer (Web)
Ethereum Foundation need a People Operations Lead
Ethereum Foundation seek a generalist ecosystem developer
Trail of Bits Security Apprenticeship (3 months)
Vac @ status are looking for protocol engineers
Status are hiring engineers who focus on incentive design
Reach developers experienced with Ethereum. $600 for four issues (~75 character limit), payable in ETH/DAI/USDC to abcoathup.eth on mainnet, Arbitrum or Optimism. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail
Regulation/business/tokens
US Treasury Secretary current scale of stablecoin market not a threat to US financial stability
Germany's tax guidance: sale of purchased Ether tax free after one year
Polynya: sustainable blockchain checklist
Azuki co-creator behind abandoned CryptoPhunks, Tendies and CryptoZunks NFT projects
General
UST algorithmic stablecoin fell from peg, over 6 trillion Luna printed
Coindesk names Do Kwon as co-founder of failed algorithmic stablecoin Basis Cash
Meta scoping single wallet experience
Discord API leaks private channel metadata: name, description, members list & activity data
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-may-14-2022
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
May 17-20 – EY Global blockchain summit
May 20 – US Fed CBDC discussion paper feedback deadline
May 24 – ETH Staking QF Round ends
Jun 8 – Ropsten testnet upgrades to PoS
Jun 10 – Austin DeFi summit
Jun 10-12 – ETHPrague
Jun 20-23 – NFT.NYC
Jun 24-26 – ETH NYC
Jul 6-8 – ETHBarcelona
Jul 8 – ETH Seattle summit
Jul 19-21 – EthCC 5 (Paris)
Aug 5-7 – ETH Seoul
Aug 8-10 – ETHToronto
Aug 11-14 – ETH LATAM (Buenos Aires)
Aug 18-19 – Ethereum SP (São Paulo)
Aug 19-21 – ETHMexicoCity
Aug 27-28 – DeFi Security Summit (Stanford)
Aug 28 – DeFi San Francisco summit
Aug 29-31 – Science of Blockchain Conference (Stanford)
Sep 1-4 – ETHWarsaw (hackathon & conference)
Sep 6-9 – MCON 2 (Denver)
Sep 12-14 – DappCon (Berlin)
Oct 11-14 – Devcon 6 (Bogotá)
Nov 4-6 – ETHSanFrancisco
Dec 1-4 – ETHDownUnder (Sydney)
Dec 2-4 – ETHTaipei
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