Week in Ethereum News, September 2, 2023 - check out Evan's new podcast
Eth News and Links
Dencun (Cancun + Deneb) upgrade
Latest all core devs – execution (ACDE) call video. Recap by Tim Beiko. Notes from Tim Beiko and Christine Kim:
Devnet 8 to be used for most Dencun testing, devnet 9 will include final spec changes & hopefully be the last devnet
Public testnet upgrade order: Holešky (new, smaller number of node operators), Goerli (deprecated, has most apps/L2s/stakers) and then Sepolia before mainnet
Holešky to test 3/6 (target/max) blobs with option to reduce to 2/4 for other testnets/mainnet
Discussions on Verkle trie live migration vs combining with state expiry and Address Space Extension/Compression
Intro to blobspace: EIP4844 (proto-danksharding) in Dencun upgrade & full danksharding
Centralization watch: threatening the value of your ETH
🚨🚨🚨 Lido very close to breaching 33% threshold
Client diversity (via clientdiversity.org):
Execution layer: Geth supermajority, could possibly cause a chain split
Consensus layer: two clients over 33%, a bug could mean loss of finality
Needed: more geographic diversity for both stakers and nodes, particularly outside of US/Can/EU
Layer 1
Ethereum Execution Layer Specification (EELS): Python reference implementation (similar to consensus layer Python spec)
Grant available to update Yellow Paper with missing pre-merge fork logic
Erigon Caplin (CL client) roadmap
Dapplion: Whisk bootstrapping, tradeoffs of bootstrapping strategies
Otterscan v1.32.0: adds contract interaction (for Sourcify verified contracts)
Client releases
Consensus layer:
Lodestar v1.11.0: adds Holešky testnet
Execution layer:
Reth v0.1.0-alpha.8: sub 1TB full node, configurable pruning for each table and improvements for Transaction Pool & RPC
Research
Decouple attestation weight from attestation rewards, proposal to reduce risks from liquid staking
Cumulative non-expiring inclusion lists, add-on to inclusion list design
Slashing penalties if max effective balance increased (EIP7251), proposes initial penalty be a constant or scale sublinearly and correlation penalty be modified to scale quadratically
PEPC-DVT: Protocol-Enforced Proposer Commitments without changing consensus
Layer 2
Arbitrum Stylus: build apps for Nitro chains in Rust, C & C++, live on testnet
Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK): launch a rollup or validium
StarkWare Stone prover open sourced
EIPs/Standards
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Stuff for developers
Foundry:
OpenSea redeemable NFT draft standards, proof of concept burn to redeem live on mainnet
Unique contract designs: BIG, many to one & one to many proxies, overlapping layouts and deeply nested variables
Arbitrum Sepolia testnet is live, Arbitrum Goerli will be deprecated later in the year
Circomscribe: analyze Circom code
Security
Ajna grief vector disclosed, repay debt & withdraw
Balancer disclosed vulnerability exploited for $2.1 million
SharedStake (Liquid staking) 105 ETH exploit, infinite mint via invalid ownership checks
Enterprise
Swift tokenization experiments used Sepolia testnet via Chainlink CCIP
OnlyFans has ETH on its balance sheet
Onchain stats
Gas fees (via ultrasound.money): 9 to 122 gwei, with average around 21.
Negative issuance currently at 20.1 gwei
About 400 ETH net burn this week
ETHUSD: $1610-1735, currently ~$1630
ETHBTC: .062-.0635, currently .063 (Flippening at ~.16)
Notable at app layer
Gitcoin Grants 18 closed, $680k donated from 47k donors
Gitcoin Passport onchain stamps: mint passport on Optimism
Hats Protocol v2: assign addresses onchain roles and pick what powers each role gets
Brian Armstrong: startups I would build today
Base apps:
Job Listings
EF Privacy & Scaling Explorations team seek ZK circuits engineer
Job listings: $600 for four issues (75 character limit). Questions? abcoathup at-gmail
Regulation/business/tokens
Grayscale procedural victory over SEC in Bitcoin ETF case: SEC must provide a coherent response for rejection
US SEC charges Impact Theory for selling NFTs as unregistered securities
Unanimous Republican dissent from Commissioners Peirce & Uyeda
Class action against Uniswap dismissed, not liable for third-party misuse
Binance: BUSD users should convert to other stablecoins by February 2024
General
OG wallet drainer update: LastPass appears to be the common link
Theft patterns of OG wallet drainer, private key compromise, sweeper bots and Sha Zhu Pan
Rune proposes Maker chain, use hard forks to recover from governance attacks or tech failures
MACI & RLN trusted setup ceremonies: contribute from the browser (requires GitHub private gist access)
Ittai Abraham: Fast Fourier Transform over finite fields
Improving log lookups using GKR
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Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-september-2-2023
Upcoming Dates of Note
(new/changes in bold)
Sep 7-9 – ETHAccra hackathon
Sep 10-12 – Ethereum Singapore hackathon & conference
Sep 11-13 – DappCon (Berlin)
Sep 15 – Protocol Berg (Berlin)
Sep 15-17 – ETHChicago conference & hackathon
Sep 15 – Holešky testnet genesis
Sep 18-23 – ETHSafari (Kilifi Kenya)
Sep 21–24 – Pragma & ETHGlobal New York
Oct 5-6 – ETHMilan conference
Oct 6-8 – ETHRome hackathon
Oct 6-27 – ETHOnline (ETHGlobal) virtual
Oct 28-30 – Paradigm CTF
Oct 13-15 – Ethereum Kuala Lumpur conference & hackathon
Oct 21 – Ethereum México
Oct 22-24 – ETH Hong Kong
Oct 27-29 – ETH Miami festival & hackathon
Oct 27-29 – ETH Vietnam
Oct 27-29 – ETH London hackathon
Oct 31 – Road to Devcon grants deadline (max $1k for local meetups)
Nov 3-5 – ETH Lisbon hackathon
Nov 3-5 – ETHBrno
Nov 13-19 – Devconnect (Istanbul)
Nov 16-19 – Pragma & ETHGlobal Istanbul
Dec 4-5 – ETHVenice
Dec 8-10 – ETHGlobal ETHIndia (Bangalore)
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