Week in Ethereum News, May 16, 2021 - thanks to Synthetix's Kwenta for making this issue possible!
Eth News and Links
Mainnet execution layer
Latest core devs call. Notes from Tim Beiko
London EIPs: EIP1559: Fee market change, EIP3198: BASEFEE opcode, EIP3554: Difficulty Bomb Delay to December, EIP3529: Reduction in gas refunds, EIP3541: Reject new contracts starting with 0xEF
JSON RPC to use same naming as EIP1559
Baikal - London devnet for devs to experiment with London until the testnet fork dates
London blocks/dates: Ropsten: 10399301 (June 9), Goerli: 4979794 (June 16), Rinkeby: 8813188 (June 23), mainnet aim is July 14
Core dev apprenticeship program, an effort by Piper Merriam to find and train more core devs
EIPs/Standards
EIP3554: Difficulty Bomb Delay to December 1st 2021
ERC3569: Sealed NFT Metadata
ERC3561: Trust Minimized Upgradeability Proxy
Proof of stake consensus layer
Huge milestone on the way to turning off PoW: Nocturne testnet successfully launched with 12 combinations of consensus and mainnet clients. It's processing transactions and reaching finality.
Checkout the block explorer, live for a couple more days
Latest merge implementers call; Nocturne is last merge devnet until post London/Altair
Lighthouse v1.4.0 planned for mid-June: 80% Eth1 call reduction, uses 50% less RAM, Altair support, Doppelganger slashing protection, remote signer and beta Windows support
Layer2
Arbitrum mainnet launches for devs on May 28. Last testnet includes a sequencer for instant transactions.
Ethhole.link: token flow visualization from Ethereum to L2 and sidechains
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Stuff for developers
web3.js v1.3.6 security patch for underscore and bumps versions of ENS and Ethers
UMA’s Optimistic Oracle via dispute resolution process. Out of beta; no need to use UMA's financial contracts
Gnosis Safe L2/sidechain rollout plan so you can secure DAO treasuries and privileged smart contract functions such as upgrades on L2/sidechains
Alchemy Transfer API to access historical Eth, ERC20 and ERC721 transfers in single call
Security
Slither v0.8 - improved Solidity v0.8 support, better Hardhat support, 3 new detectors
xToken exploit resulted in $25m loss, due to logic error allowing infinite mint
yEarn finds a missing check on a low level call; no funds lost
Fei awards $800k bounty for bonding curve price manipulation vulnerability.
Ecosystem
After dog memecoins were using over 10% of Ethereum's gas, Vitalik donated billions (in notional value, it wasn't even nearly liquid) in memecoins to India Covid Relief, longevity research, Charter Cities Institute, Gitcoin multisig, etc. Vitalik's trades were getting sandwiched/backrun, so he used Flashbots via Archerswap
Flashbots Dashboard shows ~$45m miner profit from Flashbots. ~85% of hashpower now uses Flashbots. A third of blocks now have a bundle
Etherscan adds ENS names to transaction lists
Wallet composability: analyzing the layers of the wallet stack
ETHGlobal's Scaling Ethereum hackathon finalists
Enterprise
Covantis claims 80% decrease in supply chain error rates in 3 months since going live with Quorum
Why governments and enterprises will move from private chains to Eth mainnet
Application layer
Vitalik proposes UNI should be an oracle token for ETH/USD
Balancer V2 is live with 40-53% reduction in gas
Creating pegged tokens to see if unit bias matters: Woofy is 1 million Woofy per YFI or Breaker which is 1 billion per MKR
MerriamWebster sold an NFT of its NFT definition
Christie's auctioned 9 Cryptopunks for ~$17m
Regulation/business/tokens
A Bitcoiner flips: why ETH will win the store of value war
Justin Drake values ETH using EVM fees
One more flip: ETH is more secure than BTC
Tesla will no longer accept BTC and will look at energy efficient cryptocurrencies
Tether discloses the assets backing USDT. Half of the assets are commercial paper
US DOJ and IRS investigating Binance for money laundering
Rise of micro economies: enabling a creator middle class
General
Fragattacks. WiFi design and implementation security vulnerabilities - be extra sure to update your devices over the next few months
Boring Crypto web3 news aggregator with no price talk
Palla's noob-friendly glossary for the Merge, the Flippening, PoW, and PoS
Week in Ethereum News has a new editor
Job Listings
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Devcon needs a Python developer for L2 Pretix integration
OpenZeppelin is hiring Security Researchers, Devs & Community
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Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-may-16-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
May 18-21 - EY Global Blockchain Summit
May 28 - optimistic rollup Arbitrum launches
May 28-30 - ETHGlobal's Web3 Weekend
May 31 - deadline to apply for Eth core dev apprenticeship
June 18 - July 9 - ETHGlobal - Hack Money 2021
June 25-27 - Edcon (online)
July 14 - tentative date for London hard fork (Ropsten June 9, Goerli June 16, Rinkeby June 23)
July 20-22 - EthCC4 (Paris)
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