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

Eth News and Links

Shapella (Shanghai + Capella) upgrade

Latest all core devs - execution (ACDE) call video. Notes from Tim Beiko & Christine Kim:

Empty block handling bug found on Zhejiang testnet, since patched by Geth, doesn’t impact Sepolia testnet upgrade timeline

withdrawal-devnet-7: upgraded to Shapella with 600k validators and 360k BLS changes, only stopped finalizing for 1 epoch in a harsher setup than mainnet

withdrawal-mainnet-shadowfork-2 to test MEV-Boost

0 blob EIP4844 transactions banned for now

Discussions on SSZ in block header, CL minimal presets (test configs), standardizing transaction pool API and approach to deprecate SELFDESTRUCT

builder-specs v0.3.0: add Capella support

Dencun (Cancun + Deneb) upgrade

KZG Ceremony:

47,000+ contributors, 4000+ in the lobby, 23 days left in first general contribution period

Coinbase adds call to action to their products

Latest EIP4844 implementers call video. Notes from Terence: blobs to be decoupled from blocks

SSZ breakout video call: discussion on Union vs normalized transaction representation, plan to prototype in next 2 weeks to decide approach to take

Layer 1

Visualization of MEV-boost block flow from builder to validator via relayer

Flashbots: design for MEV-Share, users send transactions to a matchmaker to match with searchers who pay users for using their transactions

Client releases

Consensus layer:

Lodestar v1.4.3: Zhejiang testnet support, fix for dropping peers

Prysm v3.2.1: Capella upgrade for Sepolia testnet

Teku v23.2.0: early access to doppelganger detection and Capella upgrade for Sepolia testnet

Execution layer:

Besu v23.1.0: move to Java 17 LTS, performance improvements & Bonsai robustness

Geth v1.11.0: Shanghai upgrade support, added Pebble database as LevelDB replacement (requires resync), removed puppeth & mobile development libraries and deprecated personal RPC namespace; v1.11.1: patch for empty block processing in Shanghai upgrade

Nethermind v1.17.0: Shanghai upgrade for Sepolia testnet & performance improvements

Research

Censorship resistance using delayed reveal, forward inclusion lists or parallel auctions

For Stakers

Jim McDonald: withdrawals explainer and changing withdrawal credentials

Guide to preparing a voluntary exit message in advance of scenarios such as death or stolen/lost node

Layer 2

zkEVMs race to be first to mainnet:

zkSync Era (zkSync v2) opens project onboarding before alpha launch

Polygon zkEVM announce beta launch on March 27

Optimism delays Bedrock upgrade vote to resolve issues from bounty contest

Coinbase finally adds send & receive for ETH & DAI on Arbitrum

Patrick McCorry: decentralizing a rollup needs to ensure one honest party can send all potential decisions to the contract bridge when the system is under attack by an adversary

EF Layer 2 grants round recipients, $948k to 22 projects

EIPs/Standards

ERCs:

ERC6498: Document signing for contracts

ERC6506: P2P escrowed governance incentives

Stuff for developers

Foundry:

forge-std v1.4.0: invariant test helpers included by default, Create2 helpers and flag to disable fallback to default public RPC

Guide to invariant testing with Foundry, example using WETH

ignore Solidity warnings with the ignored_error_codes config option

organize unit tests using a state tree

Seaport v1.3: zone checks after token transfers fix, prevent filtering native tokens & more efficient bulk listings

NFT Exponential Dutch Auction (NFTEDA) Solidity for exponential price decay

Alchemy: walk through of an account abstraction design, explains why ERC4337 is so complex

Solhint v3.4.0: adds rules for named parameters in mappings and banning console.sol & global imports

Solplate: generate boilerplate Solidity contract using Rust _script_

Fe language bounty challenges: two challenges added

Guide to using SMTLIB2 representation of a contract with an SMT Solver

samczsun’s ABI Tools: decode/encode transaction data

ABI Data: API to fetch & cache contract ABI’s from Etherscan

Quix NFT marketplace open sourced, Next.js /React frontend and Django backend

yGenius: connecting a knowledge base to GPT using gpt_index library

Yuga Labs Dookey Dash skill-based mint game cheats and bots

Security

Dexible $1.5m exploit, approved tokens could be transferred

dForcenet funds returned after exploiter’s IP & device info identified

Balancer Merkle Orchard logic error disclosed, $3.2m was at risk, 50 ETH bounty paid

Beanstalk logic error disclosed, $3.1m was at risk, $181k bounty paid

SCSVS v2: updated contract security checklist

Ecosystem

Half of blocks were from non-censoring relays

Enterprise

Starlight v1 zApp transpiler

Baseline Profile architecture explainer

Application layer

NFT marketplaces:

Blur airdrop caused surge in gas prices

Blur updated creator royalty policy to enforce full royalties only if OpenSea blocked

OpenSea dropped fees to zero (for an unspecified time) and made royalties optional (0.5% minimum) unless on-chain enforced, marketplaces with the same policies won’t be blocked

Overtime (sports markets) expands to Arbitrum

UMA oSnap: DAOs can execute off-chain Snapshot voting using UMA’s optimistic oracle

RabbitHole v2 (learn to earn): users complete quests & mint tradable NFTs to claim rewards

Job Listings

Certora is hiring a Senior Enterprise Sales Rep.

Cyfrin.io is hiring senior security engineers $190k-$300k.

Shell Protocol team is hiring senior Solidity devs & more, remote or Hawaii

Request Network is hiring a Community & Communication Manager

Community Lead for ethereum.org sought by Ethereum Foundation

Regulation/business/tokens

US SEC:

Terraform Labs & Do Kwon charged with securities fraud

Paxos issued with Wells notice claiming BUSD is a security

Blockchain Association filed amicus brief for SEC claims that 9 tokens are securities in alleged insider trading lawsuit

proposal for investment advisers to custody assets only with qualified custodians, Commissioner Peirce concerned for impact on crypto

ex-NBA player Paul Pierce charged for token promotion without disclosing payment & making misleading statements

New York Department of Financial Services ordered Paxos to stop minting BUSD

Alex Pertsev remains in jail in the Netherlands, next hearing in late April

General/crypto

Zero-value token transfer phishing attacks (poison transactions)

Ordinals (Bitcoin NFTs) using Emblem Vault to trade on Ethereum via OpenSea

Apple WebKit 0-day, malicious web content could lead to arbitrary code execution

NameCheap third party email gateway was sending phishing email

Sangria: folding scheme for PLONK

Why zk-rollups are advantaged over alt-zk L1s

Upcoming Dates of Note

(new/changes in bold)
Feb 24 - Mar 1 – ETHDenver BUIDLWeek
Feb 27 – deadline for EF academic grants round
Feb 28 – Sepolia testnet upgrades to Shapella
Mar 2-5 – ETHDenver Hackathon
Mar 10-29 – Scaling Ethereum (ETHGlobal) virtual
Mar 15-16 – ETHDubai
Mar 16-18 – ETH Porto
Mar 28-30 – Ethereum Rio
Apr 3-6 – Edcon Vienna
Apr 12-14 – NFT NYC
Apr 14-16 – ETHGlobal Tokyo
Apr 14-16 – ETHZurich conference & hackathon
Apr 21-23 – EthTaipei hackathon
Apr 24-25 – EthTaipei conference
Apr 27-30 – Istanbul ETH Privacy conference & hackathon
May 5-7 – ETHMalaysia conference & hackathon
May 5-7 – ETHTallinn hackathon
May 9-10 – NFT Tallinn conference
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 – ETHGlobal Istanbul
Jun 2-4 – ETH Seoul
Jun 23–25 – ETHGlobal Toronto
Jul 5-7 – ETHBarcelona
Jul 17-20 – EthCC (Paris)
Jul 21–23 – ETHGlobal Paris
Aug 16-19 – Ethereum Argentina (Buenos Aires)
Sep 22–24 – ETHGlobal New York
Oct 6–25 – ETHOnline (ETHGlobal) virtual