DeFi Developer News 1/15-1/19:ETHGlobal Circuit Breaker, Nethermind Consensus Issues, Reth Alpha .15
Hackathons 🧑💻
- ETHGlobal is holding Circuit Breaker, a three-week-long ZK focused online hackathon with 50,000 in prizes. The event will last from Feb 2 to 21, and the application deadline is Feb. 1st.
- Solana Foundation will hold a 3-day virtual developer BootCamp from Jan 23 to 25. Participants must RSVP for each day:
- Day 1, Jan. 23rd, 1p-3p EST: https://lu.ma/w7rc5tij
- Day 2: Jan. 24th, 1p-3p EST: https://lu.ma/4atsxoe5
- Day 3: Jan. 25th, 1p-3p EST: https://lu.ma/xevgvy1k
- Blast L2 launched testnet with the Big Bang competition. dApps can compete to get in front of 100k users & $1.3B in TVL, connect with top investors, and earn the Blast Airdrop.
- Applicants need to register before Feb 16 to join the Blast Builders Slack
- Teams must submit their project by Feb 16
- Judges will livestream their reactions to top projects and select winners on Feb 20.
- Aptos Network is holding the Aptos Ecosystem Summit from Jan 22 to 26 in Palo Alto, CA. The summit will have 35+ premier Aptos projects from around the world fly to the location.
Infrastructure 🏗
Ethereum
- From the latest ACDE call #179, Ethereum developers debriefed the Dencun Goerli hard fork, confirmed the timeline for upgrading Sepolia and Holesky testnets, and agreed on 3 EIPs as likely for inclusion in the Prague/Electra upgrade.
- Ethereum developers have forked Goerli and enabled blobs on the testnet. There was a client issue (Historial Roots) on Prysm that made the chain not finalize. The issue has been patched and validators came back online and the chain started finalizing again.
L2s
- Arbitrum introduced the Arbitrum Orbit Expansion Program, allowing developers to have a self-service path to launch custom Orbit chains (L2s or L3s) that settle to Ethereum. The program enables a new self-serve option for Arbitrum L2s on Ethereum without DAO permission, a new self-serve option for building L3s atop non-Arbitrum L2s, and L3s on Arbitrum One/Nova remain permissionless.
- Offchain Labs and Espresso Systems team up to introduce decentralized Timeboost to the Arbitrum ecosystem and beyond. Timeboost is a decentralized transaction ordering policy that is designed to protect users from front-running and mitigate against the harmful effects of malicious varieties of Maximum Extractable Value (MEV).
- Mantle Network collaborates with Lagrange to launch the first implementation of Lagrange State Committees (LSC) as a light client for Mantle Network. The LSC network is a light client protocol for optimistic rollups. Within a state committee, nodes stake $MNT (or an LSD such as $mETH) and attest to the state resulting from transaction batches executed by the Mantle sequencer.
- Taiko launched Katla testnet (Alpha-6). The main thing to test on Katla is the Based Contestable Rollup (BCR), a configurable, multi-proof rollup design.
With Katla, the team enables a multi-proof configuration with four tiers: Optimistic proofs, SGX proofs, SGX+zkEVM proofs, and guardian proofs.
EigenLayer
- Anzem Protocol, a protocol that focuses on Optimizing Operator Payments on EigenLayer, launches Alpha testnet to enhance security and reduce operator payments for AVSs.
Tooling 🛠
- Paradigm CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos introduced Reth Alpha.15, a release that contains a consensus fix for the upcoming Dencun upgrade with a few fixes and improvements to the OP Reth.
- Celenium launched the Arabica devnet, allowing developers to test their projects and dive into a full suite of Celenium 1.4 featuring previews of data on Celestia. Celenium is a developer-oriented blockchain explorer for Celestia.
- zkSync introduced the zkSync Era Plugin for Remix IDE. The Remix Plugin streamlines and provides developers with a smooth and intuitive experience on zkSync.
Research 🧑🔬
- Flashbots developer angelfish published a blog post and dashboard illuminating Ethereum’s order flow market.
- Nethermind Research collaborates with Four Pillars to introduce a framework for evaluating security measures and EigenLayer restaking strategies in shared sequencers. The report includes:
- Technical nuances of sequencers like Espresso, Astria, and Aztec Fernet
- An analysis of the cost-profit dynamics in validator corruption and its impact on security
- A review of sequencer attack types, centering on the most threatening ones
- Strategies for optimizing risk-adjusted returns, including slashing mechanisms and dynamic reward
- Ethereum developer Parithosh published a post about a potential testing path to figuring out gas limit increases. The testing approach would allow developers to collect data in an agile manner and vet proposed changes on a production-like network.
- Ethereum developer MariusVanDerWijden wrote an implementation of ERC-5564 stealth addresses. It's not production-ready yet, but it can be used as a daemon (for listening to stealth announcements) and as a library to integrate stealth addresses into applications.
Education 🧑🏫
- Starknet Dev Advocate Omar Espejel published A Coder's Map which includes essential readings, exercises, and resources for developing on Starknet. The roadmap contains four key steps: Starknet Book, Cairo Book, Practical Exercises, and Back to the Starknet Book.
Security 👾
- Socket, an interoperability protocol that powers bridging for Bungee Exchange and other protocols, experienced a security incident and lost over 3.3M.
The hack is due to incomplete validation of user input, which is exploited to steal funds from users who have approved the vulnerable. - Nethermind Client encountered a consensus issue on EL block 19056922 and the issue has been fixed. Node operators should update to 1.25.2 if they're on 1.23-1.25. Versions up to 1.22 don't have that bug.
Bug Bounties 🐞
- NFTfi is the leading liquidity protocol for NFTs. They have launched their Testnet Refi program.
- Smart Contract: 20,000
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