Jun 24, 2024

Web3 Builder News 6/17-6/23: Arbitrum Announces $15,000 Stylus Blitz Hackathon

Grants & Accelerators

Merlin Chain introduces Merlin’s Adventure, a 210M $MERL(~65M USD) grant program for builders.
CharmVerse introduces ReFi in Arbitrum Grants Program, a 300K $ARB(~250K USD) grant program to support builders focused on ReFi projects.
Areta introduces RWA Innovation Grants program (RWAIG), a 2-month program focusing on 3 key target areas: Building (Deployment of RWAs, Strengthening Analytics, RWA Token Standards), Research, and Awareness.
Azuro Introduces a $20,000 grant program to support the development of onchain prediction apps on Polygon PoS.
Fantom Foundation announced the Sonic Labs Innovator Fund, committing up to 200,000,000 FTM to accelerate partner migration for the launch of the Sonic Network.

Hackathons & Events 🧑‍💻

Arbitrum introduces Stylus Blitz Hackathon, offering a total grant pool of $15,000 for Stylus builders on Arbitrum Sepolia.
Solana Labs announces that the Solana Incubator Demo Day will be held virtually on June 26.

Research 🧑‍🔬

aelowsson published “Burn incentives in MEV pricing auctions”, exploring how different incentives can drive the burning of MEV in Ethereum's pricing auctions and examining the potential risks and benefits of these mechanisms.
Mikerah, Afonso, and sarisht published “Block Building is not just knapsack!”, presenting new algorithms to improve how blocks are built in Ethereum, and showing that these methods can increase the fees earned by about 15%.
aimxhaisse published “Pre-confirmation Liveness Slashing Penalties from the Proposer's Perspective”, looking at the penalties for missing a block proposal in a blockchain network from the perspective of the proposer.
doublespending published “Blob Usage Strategies by Rollups and Non-rollup Applications”, exploring how different applications use blobs on the Ethereum blockchain.
mteam88 published “Avoiding Accidental Liveness Faults for Based Preconfs”, proposing a solution “preconf chaining” to help protect proposers from being unfairly penalized for these accidental faults by allowing the next proposer in line to fulfill the block proposal, thus avoiding penalties.

Tooling 🛠

Ethereum

Paradigm launches Alloy, a client-side library written in Rust for interacting with EVM-based blockchains.
ImmuneFi introduces fuelup, the official package manager for Fuel that installs the Fuel toolchain from the official release channels, enabling developers to easily switch between different toolchains and keep them updated.
Privacy & Scaling Explorations announces the Multi-Party Computation (MPC) Phase 2 Trusted Setup ceremony for the Semaphore V4 circuit. The ceremony will take place from June 10 to July 10. If all goes to plan, finalization should take place on July 15 with the announcement of the final beacon on July 12.
OpenZeppelin launches koba, a Rust library that allows developers to deploy Stylus contracts with Solidity constructors.
OP Labs introduces transience, a library for safely using transient storage in Solidity (without assembly).
Nethermind client v1.27.0 is out featuring block processing boosting and a significant improvement in transaction processing with a new caching implementation.
Vyper v0.4.0 is out featuring stateless and stateful reusable library modules.

L2s

ethPandaOps introduces optimism-package, a kurtosis package for deploying an optimistic rollup.

Solana

GhostLogs releases Sandwiched.me, a real-time dashboard for sandwiches on Solana.
Kevin and Aursen release LiteSVM, a fast and lightweight library for testing Solana programs.
Joe C launches molluck, a library with Solana program testing tools.

Cosmos

hack3r-0m releases cosmoavs, a set of modules and utilities to create a cosmos app as Actively Validated Service (AVS) using eigen-sdk.

Education/Mechanism 🧑‍🏫

ethPandaOps published “Reusing the Kurtosis Ethereum-package as a base for your L2 devnet”, demonstrating how the ethereum-package can serve as the foundation for sophisticated tooling as well as L2 devnets.
QuillAudit explains Sequencer, one of the key components of Rollups.
Mr Anon shares solsec, a collection of resources to study Solana smart contract security, auditing, and exploits.
hyperstructured.greg shares his points of view on why the future of zkVMs will be based on RISC-V instruction set architecture.
Uniswap Labs explains ERC-7683, a standard for intents-based systems to improve the UX for apps, fillers, and users.
Nestor Campos Rojas published “Creating an EigenLayer AVS and connecting with Polkadot”, explaining how to modify EigenLayer AVS to connect with the Polkadot API (and any Substrate chain).
Kofi uploaded the video "Intro to Crypto Data Analysis 2024" to YouTube.
m4k2 shares a list of resources for 5 types of tests including static analysis, fuzzing, symbolic execution, agnostic testing, and formal verification.

Infrastructure 🏗

Ethereum

RISC Zero introduces zkVM 1.0, featuring cost-efficiency & performance, stable APIs, enhanced expressivity, boundless compute, and interoperability.
Paradigm releases revmc, a compiler for lowering EVM Bytecode into native code, aimed for 19x improvements in various realistic EVM benchmarks.
Prysm v5.0.4 is out featuring p2p peer fix for Windows users, beacon API fix for retrieving old blobs, and avoiding redundant blob downloads during the initial sync.
Aleph Zero is launching the Aleph Zero EVM Testnet with ZK-privacy achievable in under a second on consumer-grade devices.

L2s

Scroll’s Curie network upgrade on Sepolia is live, featuring improvements for a 1.5x reduction in gas costs from DA compression, and support for Ethereum's EIP-1559 fee mechanism.
Optimism announces that Alt-DA Mode is now available for the OP Stack in beta. OP Stack Chain devs can use Celestia, EigenDA, and Avail as the DA layer.
NodeKit introduces The Bazaar, a neutral sovereign rollup with Celestia underneath that onboards native USDC and TIA on the composable network.
X Layer optimizes Polygon zkEVM CDK Prover using the GPU's multi-core parallel computing capabilities. By handling the prover's computational tasks with the GPU, the ZK-proof performance has been improved by 150%.

L1s

Karak introduces its universal data availability KUDA, the first DA marketplace designed to seamlessly connect rollups with any DA layer.

Solana

Light Protocol and Helius Labs introduce ZK Compression, a new primitive built on Solana that enables developers and users to compress their on-chain state, reducing state costs by orders of magnitude while preserving the security, performance, and composability of the Solana L1.
Anchor v0.30.1 is out featuring some improvements, bug fixes, and the conversion of legacy IDLs to the new IDL spec.

Bug Bounties 🐞

Mellow Protocol, a modular infrastructure for permissionless LRT creation and curation, launched an audit contest on Sherlock with total rewards of 58,000 USDC.
Optimism Superchain, a network of L2 chains sharing a common development stack, bridging, communication layer, and security, is launching an audit contest on Code4rena with a total reward of 200,000 OP (~ $400,000).
SecureFi announces Immunefi’s CTF will take place at the SecureFi Brussels event with a prize pool of $5000 USDC.

Product Launches 🚀

RISC Zero has launched zkVM 1.0, a production-ready, general-purpose zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM). One of the key features of zkVM 1.0 is its cost-effective proving process and better performance metrics.
Tether introduced Alloy by Tether, a platform for minting gold-backed Tethered Assets. The first Alloy by Tether token is aUSD₮, a USD-denominated Tethered Asset that can be minted using Tether Gold (XAU₮) as collateral.
Rysk launched 100x, a zero-trading fee perp dex on Blast L2. Rysk is giving 100 XP to Rysk users and has 114,144 Blast Gold to distribute until June 25th.
Moon.inc is live on Base L2. Moon.inc is a new token launchpad built on Ajna which allows for the creation of un-ruggable tokens that can be shorted or borrowed against on Ajna.
Nuri Exchange launched on Scroll L2. Nuri is a dex with Concentrated Liquidity ve(3,3) implementation.

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