Annotated edition for latest Week in Ethereum News



Original Week in Ethereum News issue that this post provides annotations for.

One thing that surprises me as I’m out talking to people is how many folks bought the NFT but haven’t discovered that I’m now putting out these annotated editions un-paywalled here. In general, communication in a decentralized ecosystem is difficult, which was a theme of my EthCC talk.

The big news this morning is that an EthLondon/EthCC attendee has tested positive for corona. Stay safe out there.





Once upon a time I used to do a “top stories” in the weekly newsletter. Arguably this week the big stories are 1) Baseline Protocol, 2) Semaphore, 3) ProgPoW appears to be dead for now (though of course proponents would disagree), 4) iden3′s zk-rollup on testnet.

Why do these things matter: Baseline matters because increasingly enterprises are realizing that private chains don’t make much sense, but instead using mainnet as a message bus (nod to John Wolpert’s Magic Bus) is the way to go. EY has done great work with Nightfall allowing privacy in transactions, and this is an extension of that.

Semaphore is similar because it allows devs to build privacy into apps.

ProgPoW appears to be dead for now since core devs seemed to back away from the idea of a chain split, though I think running it on a testnet makes a lot of sense, just in case. However it’s not clear under what circumstances the community would come together.

Finally, iden3′s zk-rollup is just about scaling ETH and token transfers so that a few thousand per second can be done. Layer2 scaling has been hyped for a long time in ETH (and BTC before it) but it’s finally really happening - Loopring’s zk-rollup exchange went live on mainnet last week!





Eth1

What curve precompiles to add is almost as contentious as ProgPoW, but more esoteric than GPU v ASIC, so it doesn’t get as much attention. We’ve put some precompiles in that didn’t get heavy usage, so trying to figure out the threshold









Eth2

Not much to say here, the usual combination of clients doing the heavy lifting to get phase0 into production. Obviously you should read Ben’s What’s New in Eth2 for more commentary - as is often the case, it is the most clicked link in this week’s newsletter.





Layer2

iden3’s zk-rollup is live on Goerli testnet, ongoing work to reduce the proof generation bottleneck





Stuff for developers

The usual grab bag. Interesting to see how many people are building things with flashloans.





Ecosystem

I love how EthCC got their videos online immediately, with same day turnaround. Getting videos online is a public good - if you organize a conference, you generally feel like you’re done when the conference is over, which is why videos often don’t get online until weeks later. But the broader community who isn’t at the conference cares the most about videos getting online - and EthCC did that and streamed them live. Bravo to Jerome, Bettina and the rest of the Ethereum France team.





Enterprise

The structurer is called Cadence, it will be interesting to see if they hit their 500m goal.





Governance, DAOs, and standards

An update on EIP1559 – predictable transaction fees and intrinsically tying ETH to the protocol

OracleDAO – a MolochDAO style booster of Augur/REP

0x governance update, progressing toward full decentralization

Some form of 1559 is definitely going to happen, but nailing down the details for a non-minimal change has taken longer than expected.





Application layer

I like to occasionally check and see how much of what I put in the app layer section is DeFi. It’s an interesting check on what was released - but of course what everyone counts as DeFi is not obvious when in some sense Ethereum is the value transfer layer that we were promised decades ago for the internet.





Tokens/Business/Regulation

A few years ago I considered doing a token for Week in Ethereum, so I’m quite curious to see how it goes for Decrypt.





General





That’s it for my notes this week. I tried to focus less on saying something for each section and instead try to highlight things for those who pay a little less attention to this space.

Apologies for not getting a chance to do the annotated edition last week during EthCC.