The Ethereum Report #1
Price Action
• The overall crypto market took about a 12.5% hit this week, marked with 2 exchange hacks (Gate.io and Cryptopia) and lackluster pushes from the bulls from previous weeks.
- Augur, Power Ledger, and Status showed strong weeks.
Major ETH News
51% Attack on Ethereum Classic Returns Stolen Funds
Within the last few days, cryptocurrency exchange Gate.io reported that around $100,000 of the 51% hack on Ethereum Classic had been returned to the exchange. This has led many to believe that the hacker attacked the exchange in order to expose security flaws and further the idea that centralized exchanges are not reliable sources to store funds.
Events
Binance Blockchain Week, January 19–22 in Singapore
Binance has announced that it will be hosting the first ever Binance Blockchain Week in Singapore this weekend, from January 19th through the 22nd. The main goal of this event is to encourage sustainable growth in blockchain. There will be two events during Binance Blockchain Week, with the first being a two-day hackathon followed by the general Binance Conference. Please visit the following link in order to learn more.
Development News: Constantinople Delay Dominates the Headlines
Constantinople is an update that the entire Ethereum community is closely watching. Before we dive into the reason for the delay announced on January 15, let’s look at what the update aims to accomplish. Here are the specific development objectives of the five Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs) of Constantinople.
- EIP 145 introduces Bitwise shifting, which aims to provide a more efficient method of information processing. Instead of using 35 gas to do a shift using arithmetic, EIP 145 allows this to occur as a native operation on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) at the cost of only 3 gas.
- EIP 1052 returns the keccak256 hash of a contract’s bytecode. The goal of this functionality is to improve upon the design of the EXTCODECOPY opcode. This means that large contracts that only require processing of the hash to should be cheaper to run.
- EIP 1283 improves upon data storage technologies to enable smart contract developers to reduce gas costs typically incurred when making changes to data storage.
- EIP 1014 allows interactions to be made with addresses that do not exist yet on-chain. It can be implemented in state-channel use cases that involve counterfactual interactions with contracts.
- EIP 1234 is the most emphasized proposal of the bunch. This introduces the decreased mining reward from 3 ETH to 2 ETH. As of January 14, 2019, it appeared that only around 16% of miners had adopted the hard fork, with this change being the likely reason. Opinions vary on what will happen once Constantinople goes live. There will likely be a period of time where mining pools will have to choose whether or not to switch over. With this, there is also the possibility of the creation of a new coin that utilizes the old Ethereum network as a byproduct of a potential chain split. Ethermine CEO Peter Pratscher has said that the chances of a chain split occurring are low and current miner adoption statistics are flawed. Pratscher has also said that the number of major mining pools onboard with the new change will likely make it much closer to a majority of nodes that move to Constantinople.
Constantinople Goes Live on Rinkeby Testnet
On January 9, 2019, Constantinople went live on Rinkeby testnet. This news comes from Péter Szilágyi who made the announcement via Twitter. This can be considered a major development milestone, especially considering the deployment delays experienced in 2018.
The most notable example is the failure of Constantinople implementation on the Ropsten Testnet, which resulted in a three-way fork. Back then, the two major issues that prevented successful deployment on Ropsten included a bug found in the Parity implementation of Ethereum and an insufficient number of miners on Parity, Geth, or Aleth. The successful deployment on Rinkeby seemingly demonstrated that Constantinople was ready for mainnet, but we soon found that this was not the case.
Constantinople Last Second Delay on January 15
Scheduled to go live on the Ethereum mainnet at block number 7,080,000 (estimated to take place on January 16), Constantinople was called off at the last second. What was the reason for this? On January 15, a smart contract audit firm named ChainSecurity discovered a critical security vulnerability in EIP 1283. As a result, if the update had been released, hackers could have attacked a loophole and stolen ETH funds.
More specifically, this is known as a ‘reentrancy attack’, which would allow a hacker to continuously execute the same function. Essentially, this would mean that someone could withdraw funds without end by using a 2300 gas stipend to manipulate a vulnerable contract’s variable. According to ChainSecurity’s blog post, this would not have been possible prior to the introduction of EIP 1283.
Before Constantinople, every storage operation would cost at least 5000 gas. This far exceeded the gas stipend of 2300 sent along when calling a contract using
transferorsend.
To avoid an issue similar to the DAO attack of 2016, the core Ethreum developers, as well as developers of Ethereum clients and a few project teams, held an emergency meeting to discuss options. Finally, the group determined that fixing this vulnerability would take too long (far less than the amount of time before the mining of block number 7,080,000).
When can we expect Constantinople to launch now? We don’t know this answer yet, but this could be decided at a meeting on Friday, January 18. The questions surrounding the delay are being discussed quite a lot amongst the Ethereum community on various social media platforms. Many people are frustrated by this delay, especially given last year’s delay and failure on Ropsten testnet. A lot of people are also asking why it took this long to find a major issue such as this? Some have suggested removing EIP 1283 from the upgrade, but many have stated this could introduce new, unforeseen technical issues.
Developer Spotlight: Afri Schoedon
Keeping with the theme of Constantinople, this week we’re highlighting the developer behind EIP 1234: Afri Schoedon. Working on various blockchain projects since 2015, Schoedon is currently the Hardfork Coordinator at Ethereum and Release Manager at Parity Technologies. Parity Ethereum is an Ethereum client that provides the core infrastructure for speedy and reliable services (i.e. synchronization and maximum uptime).
The official document title on GitHub for EIP 1234 is “Constantinople Difficulty Bomb Delay and Block Reward Adjustment”. You can also see that this Schoedon created this page on July 19, 2018. Schoedon has made 1,222 contributions on GitHub to eight different repositories within the past year.
Recently, Schoedon warned followers on Twitter of potential scam forks ahead of the Constantinople update. This is something that the community needs to be aware of at all times, especially leading up to major events like this.
Schoedon also recently retweeted a poll (shown below) asking users about how Ethereum should handle a potential PoW algorithm change.
Dapp of the Week: RadiCards
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have become increasingly popular in the past year or so. Recently, I decided to test out the capabilities of an NFT project (ERC-721 token) called RadiCards. There are a few things that make this project unique.
First, it is a true community effort. According to the project website, RadiCards is “Buidl-t on Ethereum and IPFS by the crypto collectible community” thanks to projects like cryptodecks.co, knownorigin.io, and many more. RadiCards also features creative partnerships with bounties.network, ethberlin, opensea.io, among others.
Additionally, all funds generated from card creation go towards non-profits. Currently, you can create a virtual card and send donations to either eff.org (defends digital privacy, free speech, and innovation) or enlawfoundation.org (advocates for environmental rights in Thailand). In the future, the project aims to onboard more non-profits and expand its collection of virtual cards.
The Card Shop includes a number of creative, unique art pieces. You can even send cards via the blockchain with a customized message on the back. RadiCards recently integrated Portis, which means that you don’t even need to have a Web3 wallet to get started. RadiCards allows you the flexibility of sending a virtual card to yourself or to another ETH address. Even if your recipient doesn’t have an ETH wallet, you can send a link to the digital card via email or social media.
As of January 14, 2019, there have been 100 RadiCards sent and a total of 4.83 ETH raised for non-profits. This is quite impressive considering that the first card was only minted in mid-December 2018.
