This Week in Ethereum News

I love the subject matter expertise in weekly reporting these two bring, Ben Coathup and Evan Van Ness

https://weekinethereum.substack.com/p/week-in-ethereum-news-october-16?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=

Eth News and Links

Mainnet execution layer

Latest core devs call video. Notes from Tim Beiko:

Aim for code to switch off PoW forever to be ready by Feb 2022

Arrow Glacier upgrade around 8 Dec (block 13,773,000) delays difficulty bomb to around June 2022 (offset 10,700,000) with buffer for longer rollout of PoW switch off if needed and/or large hash rate changes

OpenEthereum client is deprecated and won’t support PoW switch off

Calculating the difficulty bomb offset for Arrow Glacier upgrade

Geth v1.10.10: bug fixes

Erigon v2021.10.03: state cache on remote RPC daemons

EIPs/Standards

EIP4361: Sign-In with Ethereum; project website: login.xyz

EIP4363: Transaction index OpCode

Proof of stake consensus layer

Pithos public testnet (switch off PoW):

Joining instructions

Video of setup on new Ubuntu installation

Explorer

Recap of Amphora week in Greece, execution and consensus layer client teams major milestone to switch off PoW forever

Annotated beacon chain spec

Consensus layer specs v1.1.3

Beacon chain API spec v2.1

Nimbus v1.5.1: users of v1.5.0 need to update, fix for deposit contract sync issue

Vitalik’s two-slot proposer/builder separation proposal for beacon chain

Stereum 1.8 (beacon chain client installer): update for security fixes from audit

Péter’s minority client: orchestrator to only accept a state change if majority of multiple execution/consensus clients agree

Layer2

Demo of Uniswap v2 fork (Solidity contracts & dapp) on zkEVM testnet

zkSync Reddit AMA

Arbitrum Nitro upgrade preview: runs on WASM, replaces custom EVM emulator with Geth, estimated 20-50x execution speed increase

zkevm-circuits v0.0.1: first release, implements PUSHX, POP, ADD, SUB, LT, GT opcodes

Stuff for developers

Replit (web based IDE) adds Solidity support: no setup, built in testnet, contract live editing (hot reloading), shareable dapps and contracts

Hardhat VSCode extension coming in 2022

EthernautDAO challenges: complete challenges whilst learning Solidity and web3 development

Jolly Roger: updated dapp template using Hardhat, Svelte and The Graph

Storage layout discovery in ERC20 contracts by brute force using Hardhat

Prysmatic Labs’ software design principles applied to Go

EthTx v.0.3.1: improved proxy processing, uses 4byte directory for unknown signatures, ENS aware

topic0: database of hashes to event log signatures, for log decoding, extracted from Sourcify verified contracts

RICKS NFT fractionalization implementation, but with deterministic buyout, on-demand auction and a staking pool

Guide to designing NFT launches: focus on unexploitable fairness, avoid race conditions and consider cost-efficiency; reference implementation

Circom v2.0 (zero-knowledge circuit compiler), rewritten in Rust, 10x faster compilation

rk4-starknet (Cairo): Runge-Kutta 4th Order Method, precursor to on chain physics engine

MACI v1: contracts and zk circuits to build collusion resistant voting and quadratic funding platforms; v1 has improved developer experience and lower gas costs for users

Security

Indexed Finance ~$16 million exploit, approximated value of two pools was manipulated, MEV bot made two ~$2 million arbs

Lido and RocketPool deposit frontrunning postmortem

Tincho from OpenZeppelin: strategies for safer governance systems

Recovery of funds sent to mainnet contract address on Arbitrum

Ecosystem

Legacy transactions overpay $1-3 million a day, ~40% of transactions

ENS updates NFT images, supports avatar as background image, using new metadata service

MetaMask opens .eth ENS websites with forward slash suffix e.g. vitalik.eth/

Phishing site opens fake MetaMask popup tab

GasNow style gas estimation, with heatmap and compatible API

ETHOnline 2021 videos

Enterprise

CAA signs 0xb1 NFT collector for partnerships with blue chip brands

Application layer

DeFi v2.0: experiments in protocol controlled liquidity as an alternative to liquidity mining (DeFi v1.0)

volmex.finance v1 live on Arbitrum

Futureswap V4 beta on Arbitrum, trades 90% cheaper, executing in ~0.05 seconds

dYdX Solo on mainnet winding down, close only mode from Nov 1

Pods on-chain options protocol live on mainnet

Fuse allows permissionless pools

USM stable token: minimalist ERC20 system, ownerless and immutable, consisting of a stable token and a volatile token

Umbra stealth address payments out of beta, setup now single transaction

Gnosis Safe live on Arbitrum

Blitnauts released into public domain (CC0)

TikTok’s first NFT is Curtis Roach’s Bored in the House

Sotheby's Metaverse curated NFT marketplace

Job Listings

Senior Engineer @Gitcoin - build the future of public goods funding!

Lodestar (consensus client) hiring TypeScript protocol engineer

Team Lead for the Ecosystem Support Program at the Ethereum Foundation

Ethereum Foundation: Research Intern, read/think/write with Josh Stark

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

a16z agenda for policy makers: how to win the future (PDF deck), jurisdictional harmonization, protocol standards, regulatory sandboxes/safe harbors, 21st century regulation, clear tax rules, unlock DAOs, digital infrastructure strategy and align with sustainability

Coinbase’s digital asset policy proposal, single US regulator, transparency via disclosure requirements, protect against fraud & market manipulation, promote efficiency, resiliency, interoperability and fair competition

US SEC Commissioner Peirce’s take on Wild West and crypto regulation, what do the people (beneficiaries of regulation) want

US CFTC orders Tether to pay $41 million over claims that USDT was fully backed by USD

Guide to incorporating a web3 company

Divergence Ventures farmed for retroactive airdrop of DeFi project they invested in, funds were returned

Steam updates onboarding rules to not allow apps that issue or exchange crypto/NFTs

Coinbase NFT late 2021, initially US only, 2 million email addresses on waitlist

General

Snowden: CDBCs will ransom our future

Ben Thompson: Death and birth of technological revolutions

Proving the security of Schnorr multi/threshold signatures

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-october-16-2021/

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):

Oct 18 – ENS online workshop (applications closed)

Oct 20-21 – LisCon (Lisbon)

Oct 22-24 – ETH Lisbon hackathon

Oct 25 - Dec 13 – Gitcoin DAO Global hackathon (virtual)

Oct 27 – Beacon chain upgrade to Altair epoch 74240

Oct 28-29 – ETH Portland hackathon

Dec ~8 – Arrow Glacier upgrade, block 13,773,000

Nov 1-4 – NFT.NYC sold out

Mar 28-30 – ETHDubai

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