DeFi Dev News 04/01-04/07 : Ethena 3M USD Bounty Program, Sei Creator Fund, OKX Launches ZK-Layer 2

Grants & Accelerators

• ENS Identity Gitcoin Grants Round is live on Arbitrum, and the application is open until April 16th.
• Sei Foundation partners with Gitcoin to announce the Sei Creator Fund, a $10 million grants fund for NFT and Social projects on Sei.

Hackathons & Events 🧑‍💻

• Solana Breakpoint 2024 is coming to Singapore 20-21 Sep, 2024, and the subsidized tickets for developers are open now.
• Scroll announces VORTEx 01, a contributor hackathon running from April 24th to 29th, and with a prize pool of $85,000.

Research 🧑‍🔬

• Vitalik Buterin publishes an article to share his point-of-view on "the Purge", aiming to simplify the Ethereum protocol and decrease node resource load.
• Vitalik Buterin reposts his post about Ethereum Layer 3s, and he thinks that layer 3s don't magically improve throughput even more.
• MaxResnick publishes an article “Increasing Gas Limit Without State Growth Implications Through Periodic Scheduled Downtime”.
• Hankyung Ko and Chanyang Ju publish an article “SKDE: Enhancing Rollup Composability with Trustless Sequencing”.
• Arbitrum publishes a new AIP(Arbitrum Improvement Proposal) for activating Arbitrum Stylus. Stylus brings Rust smart contracts to Arbitrum.
• Stackr Labs publishes a Litepaper “Micro-Rollups: Modular Micro-Services for Web3”, introducing micro-rollups to enhance scalability, flexibility, and developer accessibility in building decentralized applications.

Tooling 🛠

Ethereum

• Hardhat published a guide for migrating Hardhat project from hardhat-deploy to Hardhat Ignition.
• Alchemy introduces ERC-6900's first cold storage plugin. This modular account plugin allows users to require a special key to move designated NFTs to keep them protected and accessible.
• Reth releases v0.2.0-beta.5, featuring OOM issue fixes and pruner behavior adjustment.
• Zhuo Zhang introduces “Tweak”, a fork of Foundry with an enhanced contract debugging and development suite.

L2s

• Distributed State launches a Rust version of EigenLayer SDK.
• Polygon zkEVM is now live on Dune Analytics, including Dune dashboards and API access.
• OpenZeppelin Contracts for Cairo v.0.11.0 is out featuring UniversalDeployer contract preset and new components for SNIP12 and ERC1155.

Education/Mechanism 🧑‍🏫

• Solana Developers publishes a tutorial video on how to optimize Compute Units (CUs) for Solana transactions.
• Taiko publishes an article to introduce zkVM, a virtual machine implemented as a circuit for a zk-proof system that guarantees secure and verifiable trustworthiness through zk-proofs.
• Sui Network publishes an article on migrating projects to Move 2024.
• Sui Network publishes an article to introduce Directed Acyclic Graphs(DAGs).
• hunter from Offchain Labs shares a curated github repo of Arbitrum Stylus code examples, libraries and resources.
• Ignacio Hagopian from Ethereum shares slides on Ethereum Protocol Studies on Verkle Trees.
• Zaevlad shares some small nuance in the Foundry tests that should be considered when working with transient storage and Dencun update.
• Helius publishes a guide on how to test Solana programs.
• Sherlock shares an article on security best practices for developers using Chainlink services.

Infrastructure 🏗

Ethereum

• Prysm v5.0.3 is out featuring improvement with some bug fixes and additions such as spec test coverage tool, bid value metrics, and explicit peering agreement implementation.

L2s

• OKX renames its ZK-powered Layer 2 network into “X Layer”. The developer phase of mainnet is now live.
• Gasp announces its Ethereum native cross-rollup protocol leveraging EigenLayer to let users swap natively across L2s, fast, gas-free and MEV-protected.
• Gelato announces Arbitrum Blueberry testnet, a production-ready testnet for Arbitrum Orbit.
• Moonveil is launching a gaming chain using Polygon CDK. Players will have “ecological identity” that can be carried across games.

Avalanche

• darioush write ups a discussion on HyperSDK by Avalanche to summarize initial experimentation and provides an overview of proof-of-concept code for executing EVM bytecode as a HyperSDK.

Bug Bounties 🐞

• Ethena Labs, a synthetic dollar protocol built on Ethereum, launches a bug bounty program on Immunefi with bounties up to 3,000,000 USDC.
• Cardano Foundation launches a bug bounty program on Immunefi with bounties up to 10,000 USDC.
• Flat Money protocol, an open-source protocol for minting delta-neutral flatcoin, launches a Fix Review Contest on Sherlock with total rewards of 13,500 USDC.

Product Launches 🚀

• Threshold launches Threshold USD (thUSD), a US dollar-pegged stablecoin backed by BTC and ETH. thUSD introduces interest-free loans, on-chain collateral, and a 110% collateral ratio.

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