Week in Ethereum News -The Latest Ethereum News and Upcoming Events This Week
Eth News and Links
Dencun (Cancun + Deneb) upgrade (meta {1704158917966053})
No core devs call this week, next all core devs - ution (ACDE) call January 4
Centralization watch: threatening the value of your ETH
🚨 Lido at 31.62% is far too close to 33.3% threshold
Client diversity (via clientdiversity.org):
ution layer: Geth ~84% supermajority, could possibly cause a chain split
Consensus layer: Prysm 41%, any client bug over 33.3% could mean loss of liveness
Better geographic diversity is optimal, particularly outside of North America & Europe
Research
Vitalik’s Proof of Stake simplification proposal, 3 approaches to cap signatures to 8192 per slot:
DVT: 4096 validators with minimum 4096 ETH deposit, solo stakers join DVT pools
Two-tiered staking: heavy layer (4096 ETH min deposit) finalizes and light layer (no min deposit) attests, heavy layer + 50% or more of online light layer to finalize a block
Rotating participation: randomly choose 4096 active validators, incentive weight decoupled from consensus weight
ution tickets (previously Attester-Proposer Separation): in-protocol ticket market, lottery to select beacon block proposer & attesters and lottery to select ution block proposer & attesters
Blob DA scaling overview: up to 128 blobs via 1D PeerDAS, then increase up to 256 blobs via 2D PeerDAS or full Danksharding
MEV
MEV-Boost auction model and bidding strategies (naive, adaptive, last-minute & bluff bidding) show reducing latency optimizes builders performance
Rekt: $1.3M paid to solo validator by searcher after user error adding liquidity
Layer 2
zkSync Era network issues post-mortem: safety procedure caused sequencer to wait for computed state update mismatch to be resolved
EIPs/Standards
EIPs
EIP7581: Increase block gas target and gaslimit
ERCs (application layer):
ERC7582: Modular accounts with delegated validation (ERC4337 extension)
ERC7583: Inion in smart contract
ERC7584: Linagee Name Registrar and Ethereum Content Delivery Network
ERC7585: MixHash and public data storage proofs
Stuff for developers
Hardhat-chai-matchers v2.0.3: adds Addressable support in withArgs & equals
Solidity memory safety: avoid scratch space between assembly blocks
xdeployer v3.0.0 (Hardhat plugin for deterministic address deployment): uses CreateX
Halmos v0.1.10 (symbolic testing): reduces memory footprint, adds match-test & match-contract options and adds timeout & error failure modes
EVMole v0.3.1 (function selector extractor): adds Rust implementation
Ethernaut CTF solutions in Foundry
Sourcify updates: containerized components, run components with custom configs and removes create2 verification
Security
Trail of Bits: ABI zero-sized types (ZSTs) DoS attack on ABI parsers
Solidity contract with view function verified on Etherscan without view function declared
Eco
Vitalik: make Ethereum cypherpunk again
Etherscan: multichain portfolio and advanced filter time series chart
Onchain stats
Gas fees (via ultrasound.money): 10.0 to 177.0 gwei, with 23.4 gwei average
Zero net issuance currently at 21.9 gwei
1k ETH net burn this week
ETHUSD: $2,194 - $2,431, currently $2,279
ETHBTC: currently 0.055 (Flippening at ~0.16)
Notable at app layer
Infinex (perp trading) live on Base, web2 style UX, self-custody accounts, waitlist
Aave governance v3 live, low cost voting on L2s & other chains, delegations reset
Job Listings
ZK circuits engineer sought by EF Privacy & Scaling Explorations team
Regulation/business/tokens
BarnBridge $1.7M settlement with SEC for selling SMART yield bonds
India block 9 overseas centralized exchanges & issue show cause notices
General
Redditors report Mt Gox fiat repayments to PayPal accounts
Thunder 87k ETH exploit, wallet withdrawals via session tokens from MongoDB connection URL
Upcoming Dates of Note
(new/changes in bold)
Jan 15 – EF’s Next Billion fellowship cohort 4 deadline
Jan 17 – Goerli testnet Dencun upgrade epoch 231680
Jan 30 – Sepolia testnet Dencun upgrade epoch 132608 (assuming no issues)
Feb 2-4 – ETH Cinco de Mayo hackathon (Cholula, Puebla)
Feb 3 – Ethereum Lima Day
Feb 7 – Holešky testnet Dencun upgrade epoch 29696 (assuming no issues)
Feb 23-Mar 3 – ETHDenver BUIDLWeek & hackathon
Mar 13-14 – ETHLatam (San Pedro Sula, Honduras)
Mar 15-17 – Pragma & ETHGlobal LondonMar 19-21 – ETH Canal (Panama City, Panamá)
Mar 21-24 – ETHTaipei conference & hackathon
Mar 27-30 – ETH Bucharest hackathon & conference
Mar 29-31 – ETH Seoul
Apr 5-26 – ETHGlobal Scaling Ethereum (virtual)
Apr 5-7 – EthereumZuri.ch conference & hackathon
Apr 12-14 – ETHDam (Amsterdam) conference & hackathon
May 3-5 – Pragma & ETHGlobal Sydney
May 21-23 – DappCon (Berlin)
May 24-26 – ETHBerlin
May 31-Jun 2 – ETHDublin hackathon & conference
May 31-Jun 2 – ETHPrague conference & hackathon
Jun 3-5 – ETH Belgrade conference
Jul 8-11 – EthCC (Brussels)
Jul 11-14 – Pragma & ETHGlobal Brussels
Jul 26-30 – EDCON Tokyo conference
Aug 23-Sep 13 – ETHGlobal ETHOnline (virtual)
Sep 20-22 – ETHGlobal Singapore
Oct 18-20 – Pragma & ETHGlobal San Francisco
Nov – ETHGlobal DevCon
