Annotated edition, Week in Ethereum News Feb 2, 2020

Eth1

Stateless Ethereum: how all the research pieces fit together

Parity v2.7.1 – no more dual-track releases, breaking database changes

Nethermind v1.5.8 – Nethermind is constantly releasing improvements

If there is one thing to read this week, it’s probably the stateless Ethereum piece. It’s a big idea maze to traverse to get eth1 being stateless, though there appear to be quite a few reasonable paths.





Eth2

We’re at the point where Eth2 clients are digging into the optimizations and getting ready to dig into the interoperability/networking details to find whether any of them have interpreted the spec differently.

Meanwhile the last link is a Vitalik idea for phase2.





Stuff for developers

Bit of a monster section here this week.

Sam Sun has been catching bugs and having it pay off handsomely from bug bounties. Over the last year, he’s caught a number of things - really impressive stuff, so the Q&A with him was something I was interested to read.

Tons of tooling in this issue, especially for security and frontend stuff, but also it’s worth noting that Solidity debugging was long a weak point but has been rapidly improving with Tenderly, Buidlr and and the web3j work as well.





Ecosystem

Private transactions on Ethereum! This should unlock lots of uses, particuarly enterprise, where you don’t mind that someone knows you work with someone, you just don’t want them to know how much you’re paying them. Aztec has a lot more coming too. If the newsletter still had a “top news of the week,” then this would undoubtedly have been it.

But with privacy solutions, if you use a frontend, then you also need to cognizant of how information can leak. While the Tornado.cash frontend vulnerability appears to be more theoretical than anything, privacy services tend to worry about the worst threat models, and rightly so. If your life depends on a rogue nation state (or a jealous ex-lover) not knowing something, you need to be able to depend on privacy guarantees.





Enterprise

Faster enterprise blockchain apps with PegaSys Orchestrate

EEA Mainnet Working Group forms Task Force “EMINENT” (Ethereum Mainnet Integration for Enterprises)

Governance and standards

ERC2494: BabyJubjub

ERC2502: µTopic Delegation

Not much to say, seems fairly self-explanatory. Better tooling for private chains, even as the current push is to help enterprises realize that mainnet is already often the best decision.

Meanwhile, standards for the babyjubjub curve popular in zk, and a liquid democracy standard





Application layer

PoolTogether hit 1 million DAI and just announced a USDC pool. It will be interesting to see to what extent PoolTogether brings in new people. People do love to gamble and dream of upside. I’ll always remember my surprise when a distant family member who is a medical doctor told me about buying lottery tickets each week. Doing this in a no-loss way will become quite attractive to people, especially as the lottery begins to grow in size. Liquidity has its own network effect.

On the other hand, government use lotteries as a voluntary form of taxation - and governments tend to get quite prickly when someone competes with their lines of business. This will be interesting to see in the long-term.

With things like stablecoin.services and wallets like Argent/Gnosis Safe, it’s quite possible to imagine a new wave of less technical users being able to easily use PoolTogether.

Tokens/Business/Regulation

Joel Monegro returns with the sequel to Fat Protocols. How long until this starts showing up in decks of fund managers trying to raise capital?

It’s starting to seem like Keynes’ animal spirits are turning bullish in crypto, and particularly on Eth. Things like payments migrating to Eth from Bitcoin (it was a bit surprising they were ever on BTC) certainly don’t seem to have been priced into the market at all, as markets tend to overshoot quite a bit. Must be the animal spirits.





General

And general is its usual glorious mismash of things. Polynomial commitment papers to satirizing the self-important crypto thought leaders.

Do most people in crypto understand that their hardware wallet is not safe against a sophisticated attacker with physical access? I feel like most people don’t. There is a solution that is close to shipping: the GridPlus Lattice agent is tampering resistant. It’s a little more expensive, but it’s one thing that could actually make it practical to own and use crypto.