Annotated edition, Week in Ethereum News, April 19 issue

Here’s the most clicked for the week:

As I always say, the most clicked is determined by what people hadn’t already seen during the week.

My thought is that the annotated edition tries to give people a more high-level overview. If I were only reading a few things this week, I would read





The quarterly update from each EF team is pretty down in the weeds, but some of those teams don’t do much communicating. They don’t have the same need to communicate as EF pays salaries, plus some of teams are low-level stuff where the audience is already quite small. It’s at least worth skimming to get a general idea of what the EF teams are doing though.

Prysmatic launched their new testnet, which isn’t the multi-client testnet™ but is very close. We should see that in the next few weeks. The “7 reasons Eth2 changes the game” is certainly an Eth bullish post, but I suspect that the “eth2 skepticism trade” is going to start unwinding and it could have a big impact on the price of ETH. In fact, I think the price of ETH would likely be higher right now if Eth2 didn’t exist, because crypto fund managers have all turned eth2 into “just a meme” and sold on skepticism. Meanwhile literally zero Eth wannabes have yet to deliver anything scalable without trading off decentralization - and if you trade off decentralization, then you may as well just use SQL.

I suspect Compound’s governance will prove to be something that many projects copy. Of course they didn’t come up with it all on their own, they certainly incorporated many elements from others (eg, Maker) but it’s a solid model for web3 apps to follow.

Finally Mariano Conti’s essay on why DeFi. Contrary to Bitcoin’s “tHe DoLlAr iS aBoUt tO coLaPsE,” DeFi provides an alternative financial system to the folks whose fiat is actually on the verge of collapsing and who don’t want to hold volatile assets like ETH (or an unsustainable memecoin like BTC). Of course it’s not perfect, and it’s risky but any Argentine has a pretty good sense that DeFi is less risky than their banking system or Argentina’s Peronist Peso Printer.

That thing goes brrrrrrrrrrrrrr like no other.





Eth1

Geth v1.9.13, with dynamic state snapshots if you use the flag

Nethermind v.1.8.1 – receipts, bodies and state can be synced in parallel. WebSockets and HTTP run on same port

Latest core devs call. Beiko’s notes. Progress and discussion on EIPs for Berlin.

Quilt doc on account abstraction implementation plan

Most of this speaks for itself. The clients continue to improve while things are being worked on for the next hard fork. Meanwhile the longer-term stateless Ethereum continues to be worked on.





Eth2

The Lodestar tooling has already proven to be really useful to devs and the code quality is quite high by all accounts.

Ben’s what’s new in eth2 is also a good high-level read, I just assume you already know that.





Layer2

When DeFi meets rollup, how rollup chains will work together

Arguably this could be in the “things you should read this week” above, as it’s a relatively high-level look at how rollups will work together, using Eth as the settlement layer.





Stuff for developers

I’ve been trying to provide more context in the links of the devs section, which means I have less to say here.

That money-legos quickstarter for DeFi apps seems like it’s built for hackthons.





Security and ERC777 attacks





The dforce/lendfme attacker ended up giving back the money, apparently because he (i’ll use masculine probabalistically) used some front ends without covering his tracks, so he decided it was better to quit while still ahead.

ERC20 has some problems as a token standard, but auditors are generally quite skeptical of ERC777. Could we see a better standard someday? We certainly could, but it seems unlikely to be 777.













Ecosystem

Replacing all the different components to make a web3 WeChat is hard. Even stuff like pictures is quite complicated.





Enterprise

John Wolpert’s “mainnet as middleware” for a way of synchronizing different databases. It’s not quite “global settlement layer” but it basically is settlement but without the finance aspect.





Governance, DAOs, and standards

Sybil resistance is quite hard, as we’ve found out with some Gitocin grants issues. I don’t think anyone is surprised by the issues, it’s obviously not a 100% onchain trustless system yet.





Application layer

Do dexes count as DeFi? I’ll count them as a yes for my weekly metric, which - now that I’ve counted - is at 9/11.

I didn’t count VirtuePoker as DeFi but I’ve seen some persuasive arguments that gambling has often historically served as a (rather inefficient) method of capital formation.

It’s also interesting to see dexes evolve. Exchange is so fundamental to web3 that I think it’s quite possible that we see a segmented market in the long-term, despite the fact that liquidity is a great barrier to entry. There are simply niches that can be best served by certain tradeoffs, and Gnosis’s batched auction ring trades is an interesting look.





Tokens/Business/Regulation

Virtual gold coins is a pretty interesting bundle.

Also cool to see some folks experimenting with personal tokens. Until 2017 got out of control, the hope was to see more experiments (and no scams, ahem!) at small scale, rather than “here’s $100m in ETH, now it’s 1 billion in ETH….now you’re panic selling the bottom.” Capital allocation in decentralized ecosystems has not been great.





General

The Eth logo was made up of 3.71 million bolivars, so 0.16 ETH, or under $30 USD. A sad commentary for a country that briefly had the same standard of living as the United States just a couple decades before I was born.

Ultimately it is hard to retain the fruits of your labor if poor public policy choices are made by voters, and none was worse than electing an authoritarian dictator.





Finally, you might notice that below I added the sponsor and calendar section to the annotated edition for the first time.





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If you’re wondering “why didn’t my post make it into Week in Ethereum News,” then here’s a hint: don’t email me. Do put it on Reddit.





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