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

Eth News and Links

Dencun (Cancun + Deneb) upgrade (meta {1706492738438720})

Final public testnets upgrade to Dencun Jan 30 (Sepolia) & Feb 7 (Holešky)

Lightweight beaconcha.in explorers: mainnet, Holešky & Sepolia

L2s testing blobs:

RollCall (L2 standards) EIP4844 readiness call: L2s testing on Goerli or waiting for Sepolia & improving communications with core devs

OP & Base devnets posting batches via blobs on Goerli testnet

Starknet sent state diff blob on Goerli testnet

Dencun interop testing call video: high memory usage after blob spamming, max churn limit (EIP7514) will be tested on Goerli and first blobs expire on Goerli Feb 5

EF DevOps Attacknet: chaos testing tooling, plan to open source after Dencun

Pectra (Prague + Electra) upgrade (meta {1706492738901306})

Latest all core devs – consensus (ACDC) call video. Notes from Christine Kim:

Electra upgrade scope (small cross layer fork targeting late 2024):

Client team priorities: Lighthouse, Lodestar & Prysm

Electra EIPs: EIP6110 (validator deposits onchain), EIP7002 (EL triggerable exits) & EIP7549 (move committee index outside attestation)

Not in Electra: EIP6914 (reuse validator indices)

Discussions ongoing: EIP7251 (increase max effective balance), EIP7547 (inclusion lists), EIP7594 (PeerDAS) & SSZification EIPs

Client releases for Sepolia & Holešky testnets Dencun upgrade

Consensus layer:

Lighthouse v4.6.0

Lodestar v1.15.0-rc.0

Nimbus v24.1.2

Prysm v4.2.1-rc.2

Teku v24.1.1

ution layer:

Besu v24.1.1

Erigon v2.57.1

Geth v1.13.11

Nethermind v1.25.3

Reth v0.1.0-alpha.16

Centralization watch: threatening the value of your ETH

🚨 Lido at 31.84% is far too close to 33.3% threshold

Client diversity (via clientdiversity.org):

ution layer: Geth 78% supermajority, could cause a chain split & lose your staked ETH

Allnodes & P2P migrated to Besu

Lido & Kiln reducing Geth usage

Coinbase & Kraken “taking a look” at client diversity

Consensus layer: Prysm 39%, any client bug over 33.3% could mean loss of finality

Better geographic diversity is optimal, particularly outside of North America & Europe

Layer 1

Nethermind mainnet consensus issue on Jan 21, v1.23-1.25 were affected, patched

Data viz on whether we can increase the gas limit

Validator in-protocol consolidation in EIP7251 (increase max effective balance), to allow large stakers to consolidate without having to fully exit validators & redeploy

Research

Potential changes to staking rewards & penalties to reduce issuance moderately at high staking levels

For stakers

Rated list of solo stakers in CSV format (first 500k indices)

Layer 2

RARI L3 (Arbitrum Orbit) live, with NFT royalty enforcement

Public Goods Network, Aevo & Lyra (OP Stack) changed to Optimiums (sidechain DA)

EIPs/Standards

ERCs (application layer):

ERC7601: Dapp permission framework

ERC7602: Ethereum mixing transaction supervision

ERC7603: Context-dependent multi-asset tokens (ERC1155 extension)

Stuff for developers

Solidity v0.8.24:

Cancun support (via EVM version flag): tstore & tload transient storage (EIP1153), blobhash & blobbasefee (EIP4844) and mcopy (EIP5656)

Apple silicon support

Mutexer: Solidity mutexes (contract, function & custom level), using Cancun transient storage (EIP1153)

Forge proposal simulator: framework to create proposals (multisig, timelock & Governor Bravo) and deployment s/tests

Ape (Python contract framework) custom network support

CTFs:

SmartSecRiddles: 7 challenges based on vulnerabilities with writeups

Audit wizard find the bug challenge

Security

Concentric $1.7M exploit on Arbitrum using social engineering to compromise deployer

Eco

Academic paper on transparency & concentration in Ethereum governance

Suggest a city for a future Devcon or Devconnect

Job Listings

Status is hiring: Technical Chief Operating Officer - Apply here

Nethermind: Distributed Engineer, Lead Engineer, Protocol Researcher

ZK circuits engineer sought by EF Privacy & Scaling Explorations team

EF seek an utive Assistant to support senior decision makers

Onchain stats

Gas fees (via ultrasound.money): 6.3 to 82.4 gwei, with 17.6 gwei average

Zero net issuance currently at 22.0 gwei

4k ETH net issuance this week

ETHUSD: $2,186 - $2,491, currently $2,267

ETHBTC: currently 0.054 (Flippening at ~0.16)

Notable at app layer

Synthetix Perps v3 live on Base (Andromeda)

UMA Oval live on mainnet, protocols can capture oracle extractable value

0x Tx Relay API live on mainnet, gasless swaps & approvals

Ethereum Attestation Service MetaMask Snap decodes EAS attestation data for signing

Regulation/business/tokens

SEC Twitter account compromised in January SIM swap had 2FA disabled since July 2023

General

Support Roman Storm & Alex Pertsev legal defense via Juicebox fundraiser

USDT on Tron is majority of consumer stablecoin transactions & how Ethereum can compete

Field Merkle Tree: commit multiple STARKs using binary Merkle Tree

Apple fixed WebKit confusion zero day, update your devices

Upcoming Dates of Note

(new/changes in bold)
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 – how to buy Aleph Zero & ETHGlobal San Francisco
Nov 12-15 – Devcon 7 - Southeast Asia (Bangkok)
Nov 15-17 – ETHGlobal Bangkok hackathon