Ethereum biweekly vol.46: Ecosystem and projects’ updates, development tools and research articles

Published in

Paradigm

24 min readJun 23, 2020

9th June — 23rd June. EF to support UNICEF innovation, Onyx Eth2 testnet launched, ConsenSys launches Eth2 staking service, Matter Labs’ ZK Sync rollup is live, EPNS announced, Gitcoin Grants Round 6 begins, and much more!

Greetings everyone, these two weeks have come and gone by in a flash! It is time for the biweekly summary of all things from the Ethereum ecosystem. Let’s dig into what’s new with Paradigm!
The two biggest events from these weeks were the mystery of the really large fees and the launch of the next PryLabs eth2 phase 0 testnet — Onyx! This testnet is the successor to Topaz which ran smoothly for a few weeks and gave the team lots of juicy data/insights to work off of. Also, Sigma Prime provided technical updates on the work they’ve been doing on their Eth2 client — Lighthouse. Nimbus update was published.
It was a pretty significant two weeks for the ecosystem too. A lot has happened! The Ethereum Foundation followed up on its 2019 gift to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) this week with a second cryptocurrency donation. Reddit and the Ethereum Foundation are holding a scaling “bake-off” where developers are able to compete by sending Reddit their Ethereum layer 2 scaling solutions. Matter Labs’ ZK Sync rollup is now live with tiny transaction fees, withdrawals to Eth mainnet in 15 mins, 300 transactions per second. StarkWare introduced Volition, a hybrid on-chain/off-chain data solution that allows users to dynamically pick where they want their data stored. EPNS introduced, a decentralized protocol for sending notifications on the Ethereum network. You can get notified of all sorts of apps on both. ConsenSys Codefi is launching an Ethereum 2.0 staking-as-a-service platform with institutional functionality for exchanges, custodians, funds, wallets and other potential customers. Coinbase announced that they are exploring the addition of a host of new assets to the platform. Among these are popular ERC20/DeFi tokens LEND, NMR and SNX. New Maker auction system proposal would use Dutch auctions that support flash loans and instant arbitrage to tap into DEX and broader DeFi liquidity. You can now use Curve to earn yield with your BTC, on-ramp to WBTC from BTC and swap renBTC with WBTC using the liquidity pool. Chainlink has launched the BNT/USD price feed. Compound launches liquidity mining program. The Dharma team introduced Automatic Recurring Deposits. Aave has passed $100M in market size. Aragon Connect introduced, a new toolkit including Aragon subgraphs, making it super easy for developers to integrate DAO features and build highly performant dApps. Unstoppable Domains launches blogs on the dweb using 3Box and IPFS. Analysis of EIP1559 (fee market change) from Hasu and Georgios Konstantopoulos was published. Also, Gitcoin Grants Round 6 is now live so you can donate to all of your favorite projects and it’ll get a match. And much more! Read all news below!

Development

GitHub metrics:

Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):

Protocol updates

Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #89 [2020–06–12]

Notes from Tim Beiko: STATICCALL likely to be repriced to 40 gas, account abstraction prototype, option 2 for EIP2565, discussion of eth2 deposit proxy contract, YOLO ephemeral testnet issues.

Analysis of EIP1559 (fee market change) from Hasu and Georgios Konstantopoulos:

Geth v1.9.15 includes implementations of Berlin fork EIPs.

Trinity v0.1.0-alpha.36 (Python client) — BeamSync improvements, metrics tracking (influxDB/Grafana), partial eth/65 support.

Updated Eth on ARM images. Geth fast syncs a full node in 40 hours on 8GB Raspberry Pi4.

Miners began bumping up the gas limit:

Some polemics about the tradeoff between state growth versus user fees. Higher gas limit resulted in safelow gas fees in the teens for the first time in weeks.

Eth2.0 Call #41 [2020/6/10]

Notes from Ben, discussion of validator key hygiene.

Prysmatic successfully launched their Onyx testnet. An updated guide to staking on Onyx.

Check out Prysmatic (Go) client update — stable Onyx testnet, 80% validators community run, RAM usage optimizations.

Bitfly Revamps Beacon Chain Explorer: New features include the ability to find Eth1 deposits, check Eth2 deposits and link them together so that you can find all of the validators

SigmaPrime’s update on their Eth2 fuzzer — found some Prysmatic bugs, fuzzing Lodestar (Javascript client), Lighthouse ENR crate bug, dockerizing the fuzzer so the community can run it.

Lighthouse client update #26 — getting to the final spec, discv5 rewrite for CPU optimization, tiny RAM use.

Nimbus update: June 19th: Updates on the core spec and implementation, security audits, testnets and more from the Nimbus team this week.

Latest what’s new in Eth2, Witti multi-client testnet quite stable, next testnet in a week called Altona.

An explainer for phase zero of Eth2.

Protecting withdrawal keys.

Updating and generating Kate witnesses in amortized sqrt(n) time.

Jonny Rhea’s Packetology posts (one and two) on identifying validators.

Attack nets — a testnet specifically for attacks.

IvanOnTech’s Eth2 explainer.

Layer2:

zkSync Announced: zkSync is built using Matter Labs’ zkRollup technology: a combination of cutting-edge research in zero-knowledge proofs with on-chain data availability. zkSync can massively reduce costs to send ETH and ERC20 tokens while gradually enabling VISA-scale throughput of up to 2,000 TPS.

StarkWare Introduces Volition: Volition is a hybrid on-chain/off-chain data solution that allows users to dynamically pick where they want their data stored. StarkEx will support Volition soon.

A framework to compare and evaluate layer2 solutions.

Formally verifying state channels with TLA+.

Development tools

Waffle v3 with ethers v5 support

WalletConnect v1 release, now with mobile linking

ethers-rs, a port of ethers to Rust

Solidity v0.6.10. error codes and bugfix for externally calling a function that returns variables with calldata location.

Inheritance in Solidity v0.6

Sorting without comparison in Solidity

Create dynamic NFTs using oracles

Deploying with libraries on Remix IDE

Wyre’s WalletPasses allow push notifications for dapps

ethers v5 is on npm, though RicMoo is still updating documentation

web3js v1.2.9 — better transaction submission tracking

Brownie and React starter tutorial

Querying your eth2 validator balance with Infura

Async event-driven app architecture with EthVigil

17 checks to make upgradeable contracts safer with Crytic

Diamond Setter manager for your Diamond Standard upradeable contracts

Governance and new standards proposals

EIP2711: Separate gas payer from msg.sender

EIP2718: Typed Transaction Envelope

EIP2733: Transaction package

TheLAO is extending Moloch v2 with Raid Guild’s Minion (programmatic proxy) framework for non-accredited investor baby DAOs.

DAOs: governance as a service.

Anonymous voting using MACI and BrightID.

Follow the EIPs repo.

Ecosystem updates

Ethereum Foundation invests in UNICEF’s CryptoFund startups:

The Ethereum Foundation followed up on its 2019 gift to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) this week with a second cryptocurrency donation.

UNICEF crypto portfolio manager Cecilia Chapiro said the fund is now accepting applications from startups in emerging markets to receive investments via this second donation of roughly 1,125 ETH.

“We are still looking for big donors … also from a technical expertise perspective, we’re always matching our startups with mentors in the space,” said UNICEF blockchain lead Christina Lomazzo. “We’ve not received any more bitcoin, beyond what we got from the Ethereum Foundation [in 2019].”

There’s no set number, but Chapiro expects to find five to 10 attractive startups for equity-free investments worth $100,000 each. The fund is in talks with other prospective donors, but so far none that could be named for this article.

Reddit and the Ethereum Foundation are holding a scaling “bake-off” where developers are able to compete by sending Reddit their Ethereum layer 2 scaling solutions.

EthGlobal Announces HackFS: HackFS is a 30 day virtual hackathon that focuses on decentralized storage dapps, dev tools, DeFi integrations and more.

Ethereum Cat Herders Update #23: The Berlin upgrade, testnet YOLO, Eth2.0 version 0.12.1, and more covered in this update from the Cat Herders.

The 1.x Files: EIP 1559 and the Ethereum Improvement Horizon.

ConsenSys announced a new ConsenSys Partner Program:

ConsenSys Launches Eth2 Staking Service: ConsenSys Codefi is launching an Ethereum 2.0 staking-as-a-service platform with institutional functionality for exchanges, custodians, funds, wallets and other potential customers. Binance, Crypto.com, DARMA Capital, Huobi Wallet, Matrixport, and Trustology are the first companies to join the Codefi Staking Pilot Program.

Blockchain Security Database Launched: The database is organized by project, and collects up all the audit reports, bounty programs and security contact information that the ConsenSys Diligence team could find.

Transaction pool analyzer tool

Deanonymization using transaction time and gas price analysis

3 transactions with massive transaction fees (1, 2, 3). First 2 paid over 10k ETH each for a transaction fee.

It seems the mysterious and massive transaction fees were from a hacked korean ponzi called GoodCycle. Various miners have handled differently: Ethermine (already paid out). Sparkpool (said it would pay out but then victim identified, unclear to me if yet resolved). f2pool (said they’d return to new address)

By default, Geth will no longer accept transaction fees over 1 eth

Trueblocks: how accurate is Etherscan?

Blockscan Launched: Blockchain is a earch engine for a decentralized web. Explore websites on .eth, .crypto and .zil domains, with more to come.

3box on demystifying the many facets of digital identity

The death (and web3 rebirth?) of privacy

Projects updates

0x:

A new 0x Improvement Proposal has been posted. ZEIP-79 will decrease the protocol fee multiplier from 150,000 (current value) to 70,000. Voting will commence on July 6th at http://0x.org/zrx/vote

More details.

ZRX staking is now live on imToken.

Matcha:

Furthermore, COMP is now available to buy, sell, and trade on Matcha.

The team has opened a frontend dev position on the Matcha team. Unique opportunity, excellent team, and a great time to jump into space.

Aave:

Aave has passed $100M in market size!

Aave x Gitcoin Hackathon Highlights.

Bug Bounty Up To $250.000 USD. Check out Aave’s latest blog post for more Bug Bounty info and details on its partnership with Consensys Diligence, one of the top security auditors in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Debate: Synthetic Assets Explained: The team was joined by the founders of Synthetix and UMA to take a deep dive into a hot topic — Synthetic Assets. Aave’s first round of DeFi Debates was moderated by Marc Zeller, Integration Lead at Aave.

Aragon:

Aragon Connect introduced, a new toolkit including Aragon subgraphs, making it super easy for developers to integrate DAO features and build highly performant dApps:

Also, you can now trade ANT in 0x Project’s new exchange, Matcha.

Augur:

UPDATED v2 LAUNCH CHECKLIST:

0x finish high priority performance tuning
0x finish browser database refactor
Working through performance, regression, and stability testing
Slimming down initial download so the app loads fast
Final contract coverage testing

Also, Augur (REP) trading is now live on Binance US.

Bancor:

The BNT/USD Price Feed is Live on Chainlink. Chainlink has launched the BNT/USD price feed.

This is an important step towards releasing the next major version of Bancor Protocol, Bancor V2. The BNT/USD price feed will be utilized by a new type of automated market-maker (AMM) liquidity pool that offers:

No risk of impermanent loss
Single-token exposure
Liquidity amplification on both stable and non-stablecoins

Each Bancor V2 pool will consist of two reserves: one holding BNT and the other holding a “base” ERC20 token. In order to know the market prices of both tokens, the pool will communicate with Chainlink’s price feeds for BNT/USD and the relevant ERC20 token.

This data will be used to update the pool’s pricing curve and close arbitrage opportunities that cause impermanent loss, while creating the stability needed for single-token exposure and liquidity amplification on volatile assets.

BNT/USD is the first of many price feeds to be launched in collaboration with Chainlink to support Bancor V2 pools.

The technical details of Bancor V2 will be shared leading up to the code being open-sourced and deployed on Mainnet.

Leading up to the release of BancorV2, Bancor v0.6 contracts have been successfully deployed to Ethereum Mainnet.

Bancor’s response to the security incident:

Brave:

Important changes to the Brave Referral Program.

Johnny Ryan’s privacy keynote for P&G: Procter & Gamble invited Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave to give a (remote) keynote address about how advertisers should adapt to the privacy-first future.

Coinbase:

Scaling connections with Ruby and MongoDB.

Compound (COMP) is launching on Coinbase Pro.

Introducing Rosetta: Build once. Integrate your blockchain everywhere.

Bootstrapping the Coinbase Monorepo.

Maker (MKR) is now available on Coinbase.

Coinbase continues to explore support for new digital assets.

Compound:

COMP Distribution, Key Delegates, New Asset Pages

COMP Token Distribution:

As of June 15th, COMP tokens are now being distributed to all users of the Compound protocol. The proposal to distribute COMP tokens was successfully executed with 1,116,310.81 votes in favor and 0 opposed.

Each day, approximately 2,880 COMP is distributed from the Reservoir, directly to users.

You can view this Dune Analytics dashboard for real-time data on COMP distribution and interactions — or fork the queries to create your own analytics dashboard.

Protocol suppliers and borrowers can view their COMP balance, collect earned COMP, or delegate their voting rights using the app’s vote page. For further information on COMP and governance see the COMP distribution FAQ page and the Compound blog.

Launching COMP was the final step in the decentralization process that was announced in February. As announced on June 16th, Compound core work on the protocol is done. Future administration, maintenance, and upgrades to the protocol lie solely in the hands of COMP holders and their governance delegates.

Key Governance Delegates:

As a COMP token holder, you do not need to directly participate in the voting process for protocol modifications. A core feature of COMP is the delegation of voting rights.

The Compound Delegate Leaderboard shows the governance participants who have been delegated the most votes thus far. You, as a user of Compound and recipient of COMP, can delegate to any user or organization that you wish, including yourself! Just visit the vote page to do so.

To participate directly, join the community Governance forums to make your voice heard.

New Market Detail Pages:

Compound community members have long requested additional details around individual market statistics. The team unveiled new market detail pages, where users can easily access data like historical interest rates, cToken exchange rates, interest paid per day, and more. Just click on each listed asset on the Markets page.

More Links & Discussions

Delphi Daily discusses how COMP distribution creates a sticky two-sided marketplace for interest rates.
DeFi Rate has rolled out a COMP distribution Overview and FAQ for users.
The Block reports on COMP’s first day of trading.
Coindesk reports on the price discovery of COMP since the creation of the Uniswap market.
The automated market maker Curve has seen a 7x increase in trading volume since the launch of COMP.
In a quick video, DeFi Dad explains how to earn COMP tokens on the Bankless YouTube channel.
BitGo joined Coinbase Custody and Anchorage as some of the first institutional custodians to support COMP.

Decentraland:

Genesis City Art Week:

Dharma:

The Dharma team introduced Automatic Recurring Deposits — build your crypto stack on Dharma with zero hassle. With automatic Recurring Deposits, you can “set it and forget it”, automatically making a deposit via debit card on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly cadence!

The team has kicked off two discussions regarding the interest rate models for cryptodollars on Compound:

1. Standardize cUSDC and cUSDT interest rate models

2. Decouple the cDAI interest rate model from MCD parameters

Moreover, they announced that they have eliminated lifetime limits on debit card deposits in Dharma:

Gitcoin:

Gitcoin Grants Round 6 is live:

Gnosis:

Gnosis distributed 2K GNO to liquidity providers on Gnosis Protocol who participated in the challenge. Learn more here.

Gnosis Safe partnered with Balancer Labs to offer $3,000 to build a Balancer liquidity Safe App.

Hop into the Balancer discord to discuss and get more details.

Golem:

Golem GitHub Digest: understanding the Golem Repositories: A new bi-weekly series the team is starting to help the community stay more up-to-date on the latest focus of Golem development and research teams.

Keep Network:

What Spencer Noon is Looking For in Month 2 of Playing for Keeps.

Calling all Hackers for a Chance to Win 50,000+ KEEP.

Kyber Network:

Pre-DAO Poll: Deciding Kyber Network’s Initial Protocol Parameters.

ParaFi Capital Invests in KNC to Accelerate Decentralized Liquidity Growth for DeFi.

Kyber Fed Price Reserve (FPR): On-Chain Market Making for Professionals. Kyber’s Fed Price Reserve (FPR) is uniquely designed to allow professional market makers and advanced developers to effectively market make and generate profits on-chain. FPRs provide liquidity for about 70–80% of all trades on Kyber.

DApps require on-chain liquidity to perform innovative smart contract-enabled DeFi functions such as flash loans and on-chain portfolio rebalancing. Market makers who cater to these use cases can use the FPR to provide liquidity on a fully on-chain protocol like Kyber.

A major FPR advantage is that it allows more efficient use of token inventory vs AMMs or Order Books. ETH balance can be used for ALL tokens that the maker is pricing w/o pre-committing for any given token. This ETH can be used for all token pairs market making on the reserve.

All-in-one Finance App Digifox by DataDash Launches with Kyber Integration.

Binance Futures Launched KNC/USDT Perpetual Contract With Up to 50x Leverage: Binance Futures launched KNC/USDT perpetual contract, with trading opening at on June 22nd.

Loom Network:

An overview of the revised LOOM tokenomics on Basechain:

Maker DAO:

You’ve Learned How to Open a Maker Vault — Now What? The Maker Foundation’s latest video, “How to Open a Maker Vault,” demonstrates how easy it is to generate the Dai stablecoin by locking accepted collateral into it.

Governance Polls: Monthly MIPs, Add KNC & ZRX as Collateral Types, Appoint Oracles, and more: The Maker Foundation Interim Risk Team has placed a series of Governance Polls into the voting system which presents adjustments to the base rate, monthly MIPs, add KNC & ZRX as collateral types, and appoint and whitelist oracles.

Executive Vote: Raise the Base Rate: The Maker Foundation Interim Governance Facilitator has placed an Executive Vote into the voting system, which will enable the community to approve the following alterations to the protocol.

Raise the Base Rate from 0% to 1%

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Trends: Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has become a hot movement in the blockchain space, with promising innovation and impressive traction leading to exciting trends.

How Dai-enabled Debit Cards Are Driving Maker Protocol Adoption: Integration of Dai into debit cards means increased adoption of the Maker Protocol and the facilitation of attractive new financial services for all.

Ocean Protocol:

OMG Network:

The OMG Network team is open-sourcing its developer portal:

Moreover, The OMG Network is launching a bug bounty program to reward researchers up to $25,000 for finding security vulnerabilities on the OMG Network! Learn more about it in this blog post.

Raiden Network:

Raiden Network released Raiden v1.1.0 “The Sun Prince”, which introduces a brand new version of the WebUI.

Raiden is participating in the Protect Privacy Gitcoin hackathon (Jun 15, 2020 — Jul 6, 2020):

Set Protocol:

Upgraded Robo Sets Now Live on TokenSets.

How MAV Capital, a Top 10 Trader on Iconomi, Leverages Their Unique Background to Generate Alpha — Set Social Trader Spotlight.

How Josh Olszewicz (aka CarpeNoctom), a trader with 120k followers on Twitter, Uses Fractals To Outperform The Market — Set Social Trader Spotlight.

Fund Manager, and former eToro Managing Director, Georgii Verbitskii starts BTC Fund Active Trading Set — Set Social Trader Spotlight.

Status:

Nimbus update: June 19th.

Status Core Dev Call #32 — June 15, 2020.

DIY Aragon DAO Notifications — Powered by Subspace.

Reproducible Builds with Nix: Nix is a tool which uses a subset of Haskel programming language to define the entire tree of software dependencies necessary to manage an entire Linux operating system: NixOS.

Storj:

Storj Labs Partners with MongoDB.

Cross-Platform-Uno-App Accessing Tardigrade.

Black Lives Matter… and Startups Must Do Their Part.

Synthetix:

New BTC Yield Farming Pool from Synthetix, Curve, and Ren: Synthetix, Curve, and Ren have collaborated to launch a new incentivized pool to provide liquidity for tokenized BTC on Ethereum.

The goal is to create the most liquid Ethereum-based BTC pool available to offer traders access to the lowest slippage for trades between sBTC, renBTC, and WBTC.

This incentive will run for 10 weeks, and went live at 4am, Friday June 19 (UTC).

Yield Farming

This pool will yield an attractive basket of token incentives for liquidity providers including:

To capture all of the incentives available, liquidity providers will need to contribute sBTC, renBTC, and/or WBTC to the BTC Curve liquidity pool.

Behind the scenes, the teams from Synthetix and Ren have created a Balancer pool for SNX and REN where LP Rewards are distributed in the form of BPT (wrapped SNX and REN). As a calculated side effect, this Balancer pool will also earn BAL tokens which will be redistributed to Curve BTC liquidity pool contributors.

Finally, the Curve reward token (CRV), which is launching soon, earned through the main BTC pool will also be redistributed to liquidity providers.

Each week, liquidity providers will receive BPT (wrapped SNX and REN), BAL, and CRV tokens in proportion to their Curve BTC liquidity contributions. Liquidity providers will share 10,000 SNX and 25,000 REN in the weekly distribution of BPT.

Please note that BAL and CRV tokens are not yet available on the open market and will be distributed pro-rata once they are available.

Cinnabar Product Release: This post is an entry in Synthetix regular series in which the team fills you in every week or two on all the front-end updates they’ve made across Synthetix dApps and website.

If you’ve got any front-end requests or feedback to this series, please come join the conversation in Synthetix Discord.

Join the team on later today (on June 23rd) for the next community governance call.

Uniswap:

Uniswap V2 has officially passed Uniswap V1 on liquidity:

The Uniswap dev team believes equity, access and opportunity cannot happen without social change. Last week, they withdrew $10,000 from the Unisocks liquidity pool and will be donating it to Black Girls Code and NAACP to support economic and legal equality.

Zilliqa:

Zilliqa Token Swap: Recovery plans for unswapped ERC-20 interim $ZIL.

Zilliqa set to introduce staking on the mainnet soon; promises added value and efficiency to its growing ecosystem:

KuCoin enables $ZIL staking option for its registered users since 18th June
Binance to join as a staking partner later this month

Other project’s updates:

EPNS Introduced: EPNS is a decentralized protocol for sending notifications on the Ethereum network. You can get notified from all sorts of apps on both

Upvest Raises $1mil: Upvest is a startup building a prediction tool for Ethereum gas fees. This week, they raised $1mil from the European Regional Development Fund, through the ProFIT program of Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB).

Dove Mountain Data Launched: Regan Bozman of CoinList has launched Dove Mountain Data — the most comprehensive database of crypto investors and their investments.

SafeKeep Public Beta Launched: SafeKeep’s app goes beyond account balances and positions to a full-blown record-keeping & PnL solution. List of initial features here.

Matic Updates: Last week, Matic published an update on when staking will launch, welcomed a collectible card game to the platform and teamed up with Koinfox to launch TrustScore. Moreover, Deposits and withdrawals on the Matic Network mainnet are now live and the Ethernal world game released alpha 2.0 with a UX powered by Matic.

Maple’s New Groove: Maple Loans deployed a brand new front end design to their website last week.

Introducing Alchemy Notify: Alchemy Notify is a new product for the Alchemy blockchain developer platform that solves one of the most critical UX problems in blockchain: real-time notifications for transactions and events.

Streamr’s data unions framework is live for anyone to create their own.

Opyn now has call options.

Turbo-Geth Update: Another update from Alexey this week on new changes and features for Turbo-Geth.

Geth Adds New Feature: Following the large fee transactions that occurred a couple of weeks ago, lead Geth maintainer Peter announced that in Geth 1.9.16+, there will be a default setting that refuses to accept any transactions with a fee of more than 1 ETH.

WalletConnect Mobile Linking Now Live: You can now connect to mobile dapps using your mobile wallet without scanning a QR code. Currently supported wallets include Rainbow, MetaMask, Argent and Gnosis Safe. It was also announced that the WalletConnect beta is now over.

Polymarket Public Beta Now Live: Polymarket is an information markets platform, where speculators bet on the world’s most highly-debated topics — producing actionable insight on the matters most important to society. You can now trade USDC-based information markets on coronavirus, politics and crypto using the platform.

USD++ Live on Mainnet: USD++ is a stablecoin index deployed to PieDAO that is designed for medium to long term holding.

mStable Offers Cheap Stablecoin Swaps: To celebrate mStable’s beta launch, the team are offering low fee stablecoin trading on their zero slippage swap product! Fees have been temporarily reduced from 30 basis points to 2.5 basis points.

Unstoppable Domains launches blogs on the dweb using 3Box and IPFS.

Foundation Markets technical primer, automated market makers for artists.

This artwork is always on sale, v2 with 100% per year tax instead of 5%.

Austrian post office returns with CryptoStamps v2.

LexDAO’s personal token factory with dispute resolution via their DAO vote.

PodsFinance: Money legos with options, lock aUSDC as collateral when selling American put options. Live on testnet.

Opinion and research articles

Barnabé Monnot of the Ethereum Foundation’s Robust Incentives Group (RIG) has published the third installment of his work on modelling the cryptoeconomics of beacon chain behaviour using the cadCAD simulation environment, Beacon Runner 2050: An agent-based model of eth2. This stage adds a simulated asynchronous p2p network between the validators. In his words, with this, “we are getting close to a full-fledged agent-based model”.

It’s been fairly quiet on the Eth2 front on ethresear.ch this past couple of weeks. But if you want to get your teeth into something, and are not afraid of a bit of mathematics, then take a look at Vitalik’s design for a more efficient alternative to Merkle trees for state representation. This proposes a way to generate and update Kate witnesses in amortized sqrt(n) time. It remains infeasible in practice, but could be a step in the right direction.

Updating and generating Kate witnesses in amortized sqrt(n) time by Vitalik.

Kate polynomial commitments explainer from Dankrad Feist.

A GKR inside a snark to speed up SNARK proving 200x.

Isogenies VDFs: delay encryption.

Reputable List Curation from Decentralized Voting Crites, Maller, Meiklejohn and Mercer paper for construction of private TCR voting.

Minimally viable rollback in Validium/Volition.

Attacking the Diogenes setup ceremony for Eth2’s VDF.

TXRX Research Updates: Lots of updates this week from TXRX including a case study where eth2 validator privacy was broken, an update on patching up the eth2 spec, building out the first phase 1 eth2 client and more.

Podcasts

Loopring: Scaling Trading and Payments on Ethereum with zkRollups on Into the Ether.

DeversiFi: Bringing Ethereum to Serious Traders on Into the Ether.

What’s an Etherean? with Nic Carter on Bankless.

SotN #1 — BULLISH; DeFi tokens, Internet-era growth, Fee v Issuance Debate on Bankless.

Bullish Bitcoin and Ethereum with Kyle Davies on POV Crypto.

Opyn: The Insurance Platform Which Protects Your DeFi Deposits on Epicenter.

Why COMP 5xed on Day 1 and What This Means for a DeFi Bull Market on Unconfirmed.

EIP-1559 and the blockspace market on Uncommon Core.

Videos

Jonathan Herzog, E. Glen Weyl, & Vitalik Buterin:

The Ether Drip #1: Cyberpunk and Sign Up Page:

xMOON Teaser — Reddit’s MOONs bridged to xDAI for utility, value, and fun!

Finance

Information from Etherscan.io (June 23rd, 2020):

Nick Tomaino on the economics of Eth2.

Roadmap

Vitalik’s eth2 and beyond flow chart:

An annotated version of Vitalik’s Eth2020 roadmap.

To date, the Ethereum network has undergone eight hard forks, including Byzantium and Constantinople — sub-sections of the massive Metropolis upgrade.

Check out the original timeline for the Ethereum development stages and the intermediate hard forks here.

Eth2 — Serenity

Serenity is the last stage of Ethereum development. It will introduce Eth2, the new Ethereum blockchain that will finally have Casper, a new Ethereum Virtual Machine, and much more. The goal of Serenity is to improve the scalability, security, and programmability of Ethereum. Instead of 15 TPS on a single chain, Eth2 will process thousands to tens of thousands of transactions per second without compromising on decentralization.

The majority of developers foresee these main phases of Eth1’s evolution to Eth2:

Phase 0: Beacon Chain (Q1 2020)
Phase 1: Shard Chains (2021)
Phase 2: eWASM (New Ethereum Virtual Machine) (2021/early 2022)
Continued Improvement (2022)

Phase 0 — Beacon Chain Shipping in late Q2/early Q3 of 2020

On the beacon chain, we will finally see Casper. The Beacon Chain will be a separate blockchain from the main Ethereum blockchain. This new chain will have a PoS consensus algorithm, and it will run in parallel to the main PoW Ethereum blockchain. Initially, the blockchain will be created for simplicity and will not support smart contracts or accounts.

Phase 1 — Sharding Shipping in 2021

Sharding will be introduced on the Beacon chain, and it will have initially 100 shards. Validators will validate transactions from their own shard, and in the first phase, they won’t approve any smart contract, account or asset.

While sharding will bring more scalability, there are a few setbacks to take into account. Validators have a small pool of transactions to validate, which makes it easier for a 51% attack, as they only need 51% computing power (or stake) of the shard they are in, instead of the whole network. This technique can also lead to higher centralization, as each shard can be validated with a small group of validators.

It will be fascinating to see how this stage is implemented, as it still needs thorough testing to ensure all validators are randomly selected to avoid centralization and any risk attack.

Phase 2 — State Execution Shipping in late 2021/early 2022

During Phase 2, the foundational aspects of the previous Eth2 releases will come together and provide functionality for the updated network. A new operational mechanism called Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM) will be launched instead of Ethereum’s Virtual Machine. eWASM will work much faster.

One of the main issues with the current EVM is that it processes transactions sequentially. With the PoS and Sharding changes, there’s a need to process transactions in parallel, and the current EVM won’t be suitable for this.

The new EVM called stands for Ethereum WebAssembly, an open standard defining a portable binary code format for executable programs. This new architecture for the EVM will allow for much better performance and will make it possible to support smart contracts, accounts, states and much more on the new blockchain. The current status of the eWASM development is at the very early stages, as it is planned to be released in 2021. There’s still a lot of research to do around this phase.

Continued Improvement

Continued Improvement is the code name to encompass all the future changes, fixes and improvements of the previous stages, and whatever comes along. The following technologies to be implemented:

Cross-shard transactions
Lightweight clients
Super-square charting
Closer ties

See the Eth2 Phase 2 Wiki for current progress, discussions, and definitions regarding this work. The Eth2 Project Management repo holds ongoing notes and meetings.

Other

Upcoming events

June 24 — EIP1559 call

June 25 — Eth2 call

ethSTARK — Open Source STARK (Fastest Prover Included). This STARK @ Home episode tells the story of StarkWare’s selection of a new STARK Friendly Hash, funded by the Ethereum Foundation. Special guest for the episode — Vitalik Buterin.

June 26 — Core devs call

June 29 — Swarm first public event

July 3 — Gitcoin matching grants ends

July 6-Aug 6 — HackFS Filecoin/IPFS and Ethereum hackathon

July 20 — Fork the World MetaCartel hackathon

Aug 2 — ENS grace period begins to end

Oct 2-Oct 30 — EthOnline hackathon

Check out Ethereum virtual events list.