Week in Ethereum News, May 24, 2020 - thanks to 0x!
Eth News and Links
Eth1
Péter Szilágyi’s snap sync, and some benchmarking of snap vs fast sync
Discovery peer advertisement efficiency analysis, also applicable to eth2
Eth2
phase 0 spec v0.12 - added latest IETF standard. This is THE spec for the eth2 launch, barring any updates for bugs
Lighthouse client update - BLS key implementation, under Trail of Bits audit, 300mb RAM to run 2000 validators
Lodestar client update - syncing to both Schlesi and Topaz testnets
Prysmatic client update - Schlesi fork post-mortem, slashing client and protection
Fizzy v0.1 - WASM interpreter written in C++
Carl Beekhuizen’s Eth2 keys explainer
Layer2
Fuel does a demo of Reddit’s community points in an optimistic rollup that reduces transaction fees by 60x
Loopring to pass 1 million trades on its zk rollup in just 3 months of being live
Gazelle (formerly Plasma Chamber) alpha release with an API for deposit, transfer and exit
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Stuff for developers
web3js v1.2.8 with Ethers v5 ABI coder integration, ENS’s contenthash, and EIP-1193’s AbstractProvider
Mocking Solidity code with Waffle
A writeup of Solhint v3’s features
How to get randomness onchain using Chainlink’s VRF
Offchain voting for personal tokens, tutorial from Austin Griffith
Gas and circuit constraint benchmarks of binary and quinary incremental Merkle trees using Poseidon
Loopring’s new approach to generating frontend keys to sign offchain requests
Hegic had to shut down again because of an exploit that Sam Sun reported weeks beforehand
tBTC found a bug during their rollout; launch delayed
Ecosystem
Tornado.cash non-custodial mixer is now trustless, with the admin function burned and the frontend available at https://tornadocash.eth.link
Ethereum Foundation q1 update, including how EF thinks about funding
Intro to dwebsites. dweb = ENS + IPFS (and equivalents)
Network usage is at an all time high. With similar use of the Eth2 chain, Ethereum will have negative issuance of ETH because part of every transaction fee is burned
Enterprise
Using Eth mainnet, Baseline Protocol privately and securely synchronizes data and business logic across SAP and Microsoft Dynamics
Hyperledger Fabric founder John Wolpert’s common sense statement on using blockchain and Ethereum mainnet
Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation’s Project Whitney using Ethereum mainnet to “support private market securities, from issuance through secondary markets”
DAOs and Standards
Exploring DAOs as a new kind of institution
MetaCartel is becoming a DAO incubator
ERC2665: ERC721 transfer fee extension
EIP2666: Repricing of precompiles and Keccak256 function
Application layer
Uniswap v2 launched, with more features - direct token pairs, price oracles, flash swaps, etc
UMA launches the ETHBTC synthetic token, so you can bet on The Flippening
idle v3 - stablecoin yield rebalancer adds dydx, USDT, and a risk-adjusted strategy
Maker changes USDC stability fee to .75% and WBTC to 1%. Also, how Dai became a favorite in Latin America
Argent launches v1 of smart contract wallet with one touch access to TokenSets, PoolTogether, Aave, Uniswap V2, Compound, Maker and Kyber.
Tokens/Business/Regulation
5 things crypto can learn from Visa’s struggle for adoption in the 1970s
WBTC mints another 1500 BTC on May 21. There’s now 5200 BTC on Ethereum compared to less than 3000 BTC on Lightning and Liquid combined
Blockchain code as antitrust, Schrepel and Buterin paper
ETH to soon surpass BTC on Bitcoiners’ preferred stock-to-flow metric
General
KYC puts lives at risk: BlockFi hack leaks client name, address, and crypto addresses. Similarly, a hacker claims to have exploited Shopify for Trezor and Ledger databases, though Ledger says the databases don’t match
World Economic Forum’s principles for a decentralized future (transparency, self-sovereign data, privacy and accountability)
JK Rowling jokes about trolling BTC because of her significant ETH holdings
The Winklevosses say they own a similar amount of ETH and BTC
Brave’s anti-fingerprinting v2, available in the beta releases but coming soon in the main releases
Housekeeping
Follow me on Twitter @evan_van_ness to get the annotated edition of this newsletter, usually forthcoming in a day or so, as well as a real-time source of Eth news.
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Permalink: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-may-24-2020/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
May 26 - last day to apply for Ethereum India fellowship
May 28 - EIP1559 implementation call
May 29 - core devs call
May 29-June 16 - SOSHackathon
June 16 - deadline to apply for Gitcoin’s Kernel incubator