Week in Ethereum News, November 6, 2021 - thanks to NEAR & Aurora for making this issue possible!
Eth News and Links
Mainnet execution layer
PoW switch off community call:
average block times change from ~13s to 12s, contracts may have hardcoded ~13s assumption
Dankrad’s slides on finding the safe head of the chain
Erigon v2021.11.01: first beta release, not downgradeable
EIPs/Standards
EIP4399: Supplant DIFFICULTY opcode with RANDOM
Proof of Stake consensus layer
Danny Ryan’s Finalized PoS update: proposed forkchoice fixes can mitigate 3 liveness & reorg attacks and won’t delay switching off PoW
Tweet thread of reorgs in PoS and mitigation strategies
Latest What’s New in Eth2
PoS implementers call. Notes from Ben Edgington:
Kintsugi milestone tracker to a persistent testnet early December
Pyrmont testnet to be shut down
Staking rewards after Altair upgrade are more variable:
Attestations: 0.0040-0.0042 ETH per day
Blocks: 0.018-0.03 ETH per block
Sync committee membership: 0.08 ETH per sync committee selection
MEV-Boost for validators, work in progress Flashbots architecture sitting between consensus and execution clients
Layer2
Future of zk rollups to scale Ethereum, sidechains should take the pragmatic approach and become zk-rollups
Connext adds mainnet support, transfer stablecoins between mainnet, Arbitrum and selected sidechains
This newsletter is made possible thanks to NEAR & Aurora!
Chainlink Fall 2021 Hackathon is taking place on October 22 - November 28. Join smart contract developers to reinvent applications in various industries in this biggest Chainlink hackathon so far.
Aurora is providing $25,000 to the Chainlink Fall 2021 Hackathon.
Participate in one of Aurora’s challenges, contribute to the growth of the NFT movement, and win up to $10,000!
Create a contract that allows moving NFTs back and forth between NEAR and Aurora.
Create a connector that allows moving native NEAR NFTs back and forth from NEAR to Ethereum using Aurora’s Rainbow Bridge.
Develop with Aurora and Chainlink to spur a major surge of innovation across the NFT economy, and the larger smart contract ecosystem.
Details: chainlink-fall-hackathon-2021.devpost.com
Stuff for developers
Solidity docs code examples can be opened in Remix
solidity-trigonometry: basic trig functions, sin & cos are 2-2.5k gas
nft-swap-sdk: TypeScript SDK using 0x v3 protocol to swap NFTs
NFT Floor Market: on chain NFT marketplace contract, no fees other than royalties, unaudited
Otterscan v2021.10.05: improved ABI outline UI for verified contracts and resolving token names from addresses
ArchiveNode: free access to small time developers to archive data
StarkNet playground: compile and deploy Cairo contracts
Warp (Solidity to Cairo transpiler) example of transpiling two composable contracts & deploying them
starknet-react-example: connect React app to StarkNet Cairo contract
zksnarks-library: commonly used logic and examples implemented into SNARKs using the Circom language
plonkit: zkSNARK toolkit to work with Circom
Security
Fuse community pool drained after VUSD price manipulated on Uniswap v3, TWAPs can be subject to manipulation
Solidity not affected by Trojan Source, Solidity Underhanded Contest 2020 winner exploited Unicode direction markers & was fixed in v0.7.6
Tincho’s Damn Vulnerable DeFi v2: Solidity v0.8, four new levels, new (broken) integrations and Hardhat + Ethers tests
Ecosystem
Ethereum Foundation Q2 grantees, $8m in grants
Devcon Archive v2: improved UX & content discovery, more content on IPFS and community curated playlists
Optimism’s $1m retroactive public goods funding recipients
Padawan DAO: funding scholarships for highschool and university students to attend their first crypto conferences
Enterprise
US Postal Service Day of the Dead NFT stamp art on VeVe (Immutable)
Marvel Eternals movie NFTs on VeVe (Immutable)
Burger King US loyalty program offers chance to win 1 ETH or 1 memecoin via RobinHood
Paradigm Founder Matt Huang joins Stripe’s board to help guide web3 strategy
Application layer
ENS DAO: users can claim & delegate governance tokens per account, token farm accounts are being manually excluded
Maker DAI Direct Deposit Module: privileged access for Aave to mint DAI
Notional v2 live on mainnet, longer-dated maturities and flexible dates
Angle Finance live on mainnet, Euro stablecoin
Aave v3 overview
NFTX Swaps: swap NFTs in same collection
Spaces: message any address or ENS, token gated chats
Job Listings
Toucan: Solidity dev to build web3 infrastructure to reverse climate change
OpenZeppelin hiring a Technical Marketing Manager
Solidity is hiring a C++ dev
Reach people experienced with Ethereum. $420 for two issues (~75 character limit), payable in ETH/DAI/USDC to abcoathup.eth. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail
Regulation/business/tokens
US Presidents Working Group on Financial Markets stablecoin statement calling for congressional action
Commonwealth Bank (major Australian bank) to add crypto services to its banking app using Gemini
Turing-complete governance, composable & arbitrarily programmable
Bankless: Ethereum is the triple point blockchain
Early employees to sue ConsenSys over asset valuations
General
Harry Denley: Twitter and Facebook server side unfurling engines can be abused for phishing
Vitalik on crypto cities, make existing processes more trusted & transparent and experiment with city tokens & participatory governance
Random oracles in cryptography, using hashes that are not good imitations of random oracles can lead to broken protocols
Vitalik: Incremental verification and SNARKs with no pairings and no trusted setups
Bounties worth $172k for breaking zk friendly hash functions, Rescue Prime, Feistel-MiMC, Poseidon and Reinforced Concrete
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-november-6-2021
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
Oct 25 - Dec 13 – Gitcoin DAO Global hackathon (virtual)
Nov 11 – Optimism upgrade
Dec 1-16 – Gitcoin Grants Round 12
Dec ~8 – Arrow Glacier upgrade block 13,773,000
Jan 24-26 – Science of Blockchain Conference (Stanford University)
Feb 11-20 – ETHDenver
Mar 28-30 – ETHDubai
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