Week in Ethereum News -The Latest Ethereum News and Upcoming Events This Week

Eth News and Links

Brief loss of finalization and first inactivity leak

Beacon chain stopped finalizing twice over the past 36 hours and had first inactivity leak

Consensus clients on lower spec hardware struggled to follow the chain after valid but untimely attestations were broadcast

Bottom line: blocks & transactions continued

For a short time, Ethereum devolved into the same probabilistic finality as PoW

Consensus client teams are working on patches

Lighthouse overtook Prysm as majority consensus client, reminder: no client should have more than a 33% share, switch to a minority client

Dencun (Cancun + Deneb) upgrade

Latest all core devs – execution (ACDE) call video. Summary by Tim Beiko. Notes from Tim Beiko and Christine Kim:

EIP4844: agreed to use big-endian for EL inputs/outputs and use RLP on EL & SSZ on CL via Engine API and discussion on state of KZG libraries

Meta discussion if Layer 2 focused EIPs need to go through core devs e.g. EIP6968

Cancun upgrade EIP candidates for inclusion to be discussed on next ACDE

KZG ceremony available to anyone with 32 mainnet transactions. Wait time is generally zero.

Layer 1

MEV unbundling attack variant disclosed with temporary mitigation

Evmone v0.10.0: Shanghai upgrade & EOF v1 support and performance improvements

List of projects from the third Ethereum Protocol Fellowship cohort

Client releases

Consensus layer:

Nimbus v23.5.0: fixes missed block proposals when using an external builder in v23.4, experimental Web3Signer extension to verify block properties

Research

Proposal to consolidate large stakes into fewer validators to reduce p2p messages

zkCasper: verify Casper FFG consensus proofs using SNARKs, increases security of light clients

ArbiNet: MEV transaction detection using Graph Neural Networks

Layer 2

Optimism transaction delays postmortem

EIPs/Standards

EIPs:

EIP6992: HTTP requests

EIP7002: Execution layer triggerable exits

ERCs:

ERC6997: ERC721 with transaction validation step

ERC7007: zkML AIGC-NFTs

ERC7015: NFT authorship attribution

ERC7017: Notification interface

ERC7023: Automatic transaction representation

Stuff for developers

Solidity v0.8.20: adds Shanghai support & sets Shanghai as default EVM version, experimental AST import via Standard JSON

Change EVM version when deploying Solidity v0.8.20+ to Layer 2 or other networks if they don’t support Shanghai

Nomic Foundation Slang (Solidity compiler) alpha release, testers wanted

Foundry:

Pre v1.0 changes

Etch cheat to debug deployed contract, add console.log & replace the code in a fork

Vulcan v0.1: dev framework for Foundry projects, aims for improved vm naming & test readability

pureConsole: Solidity library for console logging from pure functions

Protomerkle: Solidity library to build onchain merkle trees

YulExp2Huff: convert Yul arithmetic expressions to Huff equivalent

Wagmi v1: uses viem (rather than ethers), reduced bundle size, prepare hooks not mandatory and deterministic errors;

RainbowKit v1: supports wagmi v1 & viem, improved browser extension support

OpenZeppelin Contracts Wizard + Remix used to deploy a testnet memecoin in 27 seconds

Coherent mainnet dataset: CC0, 95% decoded logs/txs/traces, via Snowflake or API

PGP onchain keyserver, concept

Dappnet: portal for decentralized front ends, Chrome/Firefox/Brave on macOS, alpha

Security

Immunefi: unauthorized whitehat hacking is unethical

Ecosystem

Validator exit queue was emptied of everyone wanting to withdraw

Ether supply is down 100k ETH in 30 days

Google search for an address shows Ether balance, doesn’t support ENS yet

Enterprise

EY OpsChain ESG: tokenized CO2 emissions & carbon credits, beta

Notable at app layer

Rune’s Maker endgame roadmap: rebranding, new stablecoin & governance token (1:1200 ratio)

Maker Spark Protocol: lend & borrow ETH, stETH, DAI & sDAI

Aragon Association refusing to transfer treasury to Aragon DAO

Cozy v2 (protection marketplace) live on Optimism, non-US, limited to $5M per protection set

Ethereum Attestation Service: attest & verify a file

Tessera (formerly Fractional) winding down

Karma delegate activity tracker to check DAO delegate performance

Job Listings

Snr React Native UI Dev at Status: All jobs

Solidity team need a highly skilled Developer Advocate

Regulation/business/tokens

US Chamber of Commerce amicus brief in Coinbase SEC case

Biden gaslights that there is a special tax loophole for crypto

Former Coinbase product manager sentenced to 2 years jail in insider trading case

IRS $44 billion claims on FTX entities

General/crypto

Pseudorandom functions & permutations explainer

MSI private keys published by hackers, could be used to to sign malware

Upcoming Dates of Note

(new/changes in bold)
May 19-23 – Edcon Montenegro (changed from Vienna)
May 20-21 – ETHDam (Amsterdam) conference & hackathon
May 24-26 – Spaghett ETH (Naples) conference
May 26-28 – ETHDublin hackathon
Jun 2-4 – ETH Seoul
Jun 2-6 – ETH Belgrade conference & hackathon
Jun 9-11 – ETHPrague conference & hackathon
Jun 23–25 – ETHGlobal Waterloo (changed from Toronto)
Jul 5-9 – ETHBarcelona conference & hackathon
Jul 17-20 – EthCC (Paris)
Jul 21–23 – ETHGlobal Paris
Aug 15-16 – ETHToronto & ETHWomen
Aug 16-19 – Ethereum Argentina (Buenos Aires)
Aug 28-30 – Science of Blockchain Conference (Stanford University)
Aug 30 - Sep 3 – ETHWarsaw conference & hackathon
Sep 1-3 – Ethcon Korea hackathon
Sep 10-12 – Ethereum Singapore hackathon & conference
Sep 11-13 – DappCon (Berlin)
Sep 15 – Protocol Berg (Berlin)
Sep 18-21 – ETH Montréal hackathon & conference
Sep 22–24 – ETHGlobal New York
Oct 5-6 – ETHMilan conference
Oct 6–27 – ETHOnline (ETHGlobal) virtual
Oct 27–29 – ETH Miami festival + hackathon
Oct 28–30 – ETH Lisbon hackathon
Nov 3-5 – ETH Lisbon hackathon
Nov 13-19 – Devconnect (Istanbul)
Nov 17-19 - ETHIstanbul (EthGlobal)