Week in Ethereum News, May 23, 2021 - thanks to Celer's Layer2.finance for making this issue possible!
Eth News and Links
Mainnet execution layer
Why we needed to increase gas for state access opcodes. Hubert Ritzdorf, Matthias Egli and Daniel Perez had found a cheap way to spam attack the network. Dynamic state snapshots in Geth as mitigation in combination with EIP2929 and EIP2930.
EIP1559 cheatsheet for wallet devs & users
London testnet Baikal shows EIP1559 transaction data in block explorer
Beiko's core devs update: an overview of progress on London and turning off PoW
Turbo-Geth renaming to Erigon, also reimplementing Erigon into C++ and Rust clients named Silkworm and Akula respectively
Vitalik’s dust cleanup ideas
EIPs/Standards
EIP3584: Block Access List
Proof of stake consensus layer
Latest PoS implementers call. Notes from Ben Edgington and Alex Stokes. Client improvements and getting ready for Altair upgrade
Teku speeds up syncing with weak subjectivity checkpoints and Infura
Nimbus v1.3.0: safer and easier options to migrate from other clients
Latest what’s new in PoS. Ben’s view is that PoW switch off is more likely to happen in Q1 2022 than this year
Layer2
Kris Kaczor’s tweetstorm comparing Arbitrum and Optimism’s optimistic rollups
Etherscan now provides a block explorer for Optimism
The Verifier’s Dilemma in-depth for fraud proof systems
Connext’s virtual AMMs and liquidity auctions for load balancing in cross-chain swaps
An overview of the differences between optimistic rollups and zk rollups
Patrick McCorry: the bridge determines what is Layer 2
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Stuff for developers
Ethers v5.2.0, custom contract errors, detect replacement transactions
Starlight: EY’s prototype transpiler to write ZKapps in Solidity
The most popular secp256k1 library (elliptic) for node & browsers is lightly maintained. Consider switching to noble
EVM tool to run ABI encoded data for a receiver, sender and block
evm-fp: multiplies by 1e18 to make tests more declarative
GSN v2’s decentralized meta transaction relayers launches with better relay routing and anti-griefing protections: allow users to pay gas in any token/fiat
Wallet devs join the London Infrastructure Readiness call, includes what naming to expose to users
A tutorial on using Splunk to analyze Geth metrics, logs and ledger data
Share with web devs - we need them: Austin Griffith scaffold-eth onboarding video for web2 devs
freeCodeCamp's intro to web3
Security
Binance’s chain suffers multiple attacks:
Bunny Finance ~$45m lost in economic exploit by manipulating the BUNNY mint price
Venus’s $100m+ in cascading liquidations from manipulating price reported by a Chainlink oracle
bEarn $11m lost due to bug in internal withdraw logic
Analysis of Meebit NFT rare mint claim exploit
yEarn finds flaw in yvWETH MakerDAO strategy accounting logic; no funds lost
Ecosystem
Ethereum will use ~99.95% less energy when we switch off proof of work
Vitalik burns 90% of their remaining dog meme tokens with message: plans to donate 10% and asks projects not to give him tokens/power without consent
Out: “seed phrase.” In: “secret recovery phrase”
Coinbase Wallet browser extension: confirm transactions on mobile app
Enterprise
Birra Peroni goes live on mainnet using EY OpsChain Traceability to notarize information and tokenize goods as NFTs
Application layer
DeFi performance during ETH price drop: DEX $10B volume day
Uniswap V3 flipped V2 to be number one DEX
The Wharton School: DeFi Beyond the Hype
Dark Forest v0.6 game is live: series of rounds over 2-3 months
Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon’s new animated series Krapoplis to use NFT marketplace
Charlie Bit My Finger video to be deleted from YouTube after being auctioned as NFT
Regulation/business/tokens
US Federal Reserve to release discussion paper in summer (US) on digital payments and establishing a CBDC
US proposal for businesses to report $10k+ crypto transactions to IRS
Three Chinese financial industry groups announced member institutions shall not conduct business related to virtual currency
Placeholder VC: Isomorphism in DAO governance
Proposed roadmap for Synthetix: 4 subprojects will get their own token for coordinating micro-incentives within the projects
UK Conservative MP mentions ETH flipping BTC in parliament speech
If Ethereum was a public company: Ethereum Q1 results - transaction fees up 200x to $1.7 billion compared to $8 million in Q1 2020
General
Dankrad Feist explains what a 51% attack can and can’t do
Vitalik: Limits to blockchain scalability
Social consensus is Layer 0 of blockchains
Run Node.js natively in the browser, with plans to get Hardhat working in a WebContainer
Wired’s account of RSA getting cracked in 2011
If you run Windows, installing a CIS language keyboard can help keep your machine malware-free
Job Listings
Quant (options trading) is hiring for Solidity, full stack, & designers
Very large game company looking for devs/marketing for NFT product
WalletConnect: Tech Product Manager and DevOps/Backend Engineer
Trail of Bits’ Blockchain Security Analyst Apprenticeship program
Synthetix: Growth Marketer, Designer, Front End Eng and Blockchain Eng
Want your job listing here? $345 per line (~75 character limit including spaces), payable in ETH (or 345 DAI or 345 USDC) to abcoathup.eth. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail
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Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-may-23-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
May 26 - London Infrastructure Readiness call
May 28 – optimistic rollup Arbitrum launches
May 28-30 – ETHGlobal’s Web3 Weekend
May 29 - Road to Devcon Quest: EthStaker Painting Party
May 31 – deadline to apply for Eth core dev apprenticeship
June 18 – July 9 – ETHGlobal – Hack Money 2021
June 25-27 – Edcon (Shenzhen/online)
July 10 - Road to Devcon Quest: Devcon Trivia Game
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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