DeFi Dev News 3/25-3/31: Avalanche Community Grants Program, Foundry test tips, Potential Security Risk of Modular Blockchain

Grants & Accelerators

• BuidlGuidl Grants program is officially live, which supports builders creating open source prototypes, tooling, and education on Ethereum.
• Avalanche Foundation launches Community Grants Program aiming to bootstrap projects building in the Avalanche ecosystem.
• Zircuit launches “Build to Earn” program to reward ecosystem builders with Zircuit Points.
• Arbitrum announces Arbitrum Foundations Grants Program Phase 3 will open to apply on April 15th, and the application of Phase 2 will close on April 3rd.
• Gitcoin announces the 20th round of Gitcoin Grants will open to apply on April 2nd with 4 Dedicated Rounds in the OSS Program including Hackathon Alumni, dApps & Apps, Developer Tooling & Libraries and Web3 Infrastructure.

Hackathons & Events 🧑‍💻

• Sui Basecamp's live agenda for April 10-11, 2024, in Paris, France is now available.

Research 🧑‍🔬

• domothy writes an article to explain why he thinks “EIP-3074: AUTH and AUTHCALL opcodes” has the potential to supercharge Ethereum wallets.
• Four Pillars publishes a report on discussing the potential security risks of Modular Blockchain and analysis of projects, including Eclipse, Espresso Systems and Dymension.
• Vitalik Buterin publishes an article: Supporting decentralized staking through more anti-correlation incentives.
• Vitalik Buterin publishes an article “Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?” to reveal what comes next after blob activation.
• proto.eth introduces EIP-7664: Access-Key opcode, which enables contracts to read inputs that are statically declared in access-lists.

Tooling 🛠

Ethereum

• Remix v0.46.0 is out featuring the functionality of the Cancun fork works in Remix VM and the latest Solidity compiler version set to 0.8.25.

Solana

• SolMail, a groundbreaking communication protocol that enables users to send and receive mail using only a wallet address, successfully sent the first email on Solana.
• Switchboard On-Demand is live on Solana Devnet, which is a user-centric pull model to allowing protocols and users to have more control.

Aptos

• Econia Reference Frontend is live, which is an open-source frontend allowing developers to leverage the Econia on-chain order book on Aptos.

Education/Mechanism 🧑‍🏫

• Keone Hon, Co-founder of Monad, discusses the execution bottlenecks and gas limit both for L1 and L2.
• Zaevlad shares Foundry tips to test smart contract with private key more safely.
• Marc Garreau publishes an article to introduce the WebSocket protocol and how to use the new and improved WebSocketProvider in web3.py library.
• Ackee Blockchain Security presents "School of Solana Season 5", a 9-week free online bootcamp starting on April 10, offering Rust language and Solana certification, supported by Solana Foundation with an application deadline of April 7.
• Joe C, engineer at Anza, publishes an article to introduce how Solana client Agave's runtime works.
• Guvenkaya, a security research firm, releases free online course “Rust Security Foundations”.
• Coinbase publishes “Coinbase Solidity Style Guide”, sharing the best practices of development and testing EVM-based smart contracts.

Infrastructure 🏗

Ethereum

• Teku v24.3.1 is out featuring improvements to CPU and bandwidth issues observed since Deneb upgrade. Teku is an Ethereum 2.0 client for institutional staking.
• Prysm v5.0.2 is out featuring some optimizations, UX improvements, and bug fixes. Prysm is a full-featured client for the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake protocol written in Go.

L2s

• Play AI partners with Polygon to build the first modular chain for the deployment of AI models for gaming using Polygon CDK.
• Syndicate launches Degen Chain, which is a low-cost L3 for the Degen community built with Arbitrum Orbit, Base for settlement, and AnyTrust for data availability.
• Celestia Labs introduces Blobstream, which allows developers to use Celestia as the data availability layer for the Ethereum L2.

Bitcoin

• BEVM Mainnet is alive. BEVM is a decentralized EVM-compatible Bitcoin Layer2 based on Taproot Consensus, applying MAST to realize automated signature.

Solana

• Circle partners with Solana to release CCTP (Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol) on Solana mainnet, allowing Solana developers to natively swap USDC tokens from Ethereum and other ecosystems.

Security 👾

• Munchables, Blast-based GameFi project, was hacked and incurred a loss of $62 million, and the hacker has already returned all the funds to a multi-signature wallet.
• Prisma Finance suffers $11.6 million exploit due to the vulnerability in the MigrateTroveZap contract, and has published a post-mortem report with Prisma Risk Team and wavey0x.
• Dolomite was exploited and lost 1.8M last week. During the weekend Dolomite reached a deal with the hacker and retrieved 90% of the funds with a refund plan coming this week.

Bug Bounties 🐞

• ether.fi, a decentralized and non-custodial delegated staking protocol with a Liquid Staking token, launches a bug bounty program with Immunefi with bounties up to 200,000 USDC.
• Ondo Finance, a real-world asset (RWA) protocol, launches audit contest on Code4rena with total rewards of 36,500 USDC.
• Panoptic, a perpetual, oracle-free options protocol, launches audit contest on Code4rena with total rewards of 120,000 USDC.
• Zivoe, a real-world asset credit protocol, launches audit contest on Sherlock with total rewards of 80,000 USDC.

Product Launches 🚀

• BadgerDAO launched eBTC, a stETH-backed, synthetic bitcoin token in collaboration with Lido. Users can now use ETH, WETH, stETH, or wstETH to borrow eBTC without any upfront fees or interest.
• Notional V3 is live on Ethereum Mainnet. Users can provide liquidity to ETH, USDC, USDT, and rETH to earn yield + NOTE incentives or use these assets as collateral.
• Linear released V2 with protocol enhancements, a fresh website, and a suite of new dApps. Linear also released the 2.0 roadmap for the upcoming updates.
• Metaplex launched Core on devnet. Core is an NFT standard aiming to reduce compute requirements, increase throughput, and help improve Solana network efficiency.
• MIMSwap, Abracadabra’s stable swap, is live on Blast Mainnet. LP, Stake, and Lock functionalities are all live with swapping coming soon.

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