# Week in Ethereum News, March 23, 2024 Source: https://weekinethereum.substack.com/p/week-in-ethereum-news-march-23-2024 Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Week-in-Ethereum-News-March-23-2024?index=0x65fe2036a4ce3773ba27c63725403ba289e820b40337874353970a631630e133aa5cfbce Submitted by tim on 2024-03-23 UTC, 2 upvotes, 1 comment ## Summary This is a weekly Ethereum newsletter roundup from March 23, 2024, covering protocol development, client diversity, security incidents and ecosystem news. On the Pectra upgrade, EIP7251 (max effective balance increase) was added to the fork, while EIP7547 (inclusion lists) was considered for inclusion with review in four weeks. Client diversity notes list Geth at 66% on the execution layer and Prysm at 38% on the consensus layer, and Lido at 30.59% is described as close to the 33.3% threshold. Security items include a $4.8M Super Sushi Samurai exploit on Blast and a $1.8M Dolomite exploit of old contracts. ## Article Pectra (Prague + Electra) upgrade (meta EIP7600) Latest all core devs – consensus (ACDC) call video. Notes from Christine Kim: Proposal to set default local block boost to 10% Pectra upgrade (small fork targeting late 2024) EIP7251 maxEB (increase max effective balance): added to Pectra EIP7547 IL (inclusion lists): considered for inclusion in Pectra, review in 4 weeks, doing both maxEB + IL increases upgrade complexity and deprioritizes peerDAS EIP7659 increase blob throughput proposal to increase to target of 8 & maximum of 16 blobs per block (up from 3/6) over 4 months Light client proposals: EIP7658 light client data backfill & EIP7657 sync committee slashings P2P proposals: network shards, IDONTWANT control message & deprecate mplex EIP7251 maxEB (increase max effective balance): Breakout call notes EIP7547 IL (inclusion lists): Breakout call video and notes: plan to finalize proof of concept (PoC) specs, begin client PoC implementations & interop on a devnet Terence: changes to support blob transactions within existing IL design Centralization watch: threatening the value of your ETH 🚨 Lido at 30.59% is far too close to 33.3% threshold Client diversity (via clientdiversity.org): Execution layer: Geth 66% majority Coinbase migrated to ~50% Nethermind Geth vulnerability disclosed: all EL clients updated to safe RPC limits Nethermind post mortem of January block processing issue Consensus layer: Prysm 38% majority Any client bug over 33.3% could mean loss of finality Better geographic diversity is optimal, particularly outside of North America & Europe Layer 1 Eric Conner & Mariano Conti campaign to raise the gas limit to 40M Calldata.pics: live charts of calldata & blob usage ethPandaOps: Attacknet: inject faults into a devnet, uses Kurtosis & Chaos Mesh Dencun upgrade analysis: open questions on reorg rate, attestation effectiveness & safely increasing blob parameters Dencun diary: contributor reflections, future priorities & improvement suggestions Client Releases Consensus layer: Lighthouse v5.1.2: hotfix for block lookup duplicate requests and to stop propagation of slashings for slashed attesters Execution layer: Erigon v2.59.0: post Dencun fixes Reth v0.2.0-beta.3: fix critical in static files that could lead to inconsistent storage state Research Discouragement attack against centralized validator sets Layer 2 Optimism fault proofs live on OP Sepolia testnet EIPs/Standards EIPs: EIP7657: Sync committee slashings EIP7658: Light client data backfill EIP7659: Stepwise blob throughput increase ERCs (application layer): ERC7656: Generalized token-linked contracts Stuff for developers Etherscan contract verification updated: multichain verification with single API key and suggest name tags, labels & URL OpenSea Seaport v1.6: adds Seaport hooks 555 NFT: onchain audio & SVG Guide to implementing stateful invariant testing with Halmos Ethernaut-cli (tool box): built on Hardhat tasks, AI requires OpenAI API key; beta Ec (Rust library): convert bytes into minimal number of blobs Lodestar Prover: middleware wrapper around light client for dapps CTFs: OpenZeppelin Ethernaut CTF 2024 challenges & solutions Cyfrin Updraft adds web3 DevOps & Assembly & Formal Verification courses Reminder: Goerli testnet sunsets Apr 17, most validators have shutdown, opportunity to research long-range attacks Use Sepolia testnet for application layer testing Security Super Sushi Samurai $4.8M exploit on Blast via transferring to self to double balance, white hat Dolomite $1.8M exploit of old contracts, revoke approvals ParaSwap Augustus V6 contract vulnerability, white hat, revoke approvals AirDAO LP drained via social engineering Finding an ERC4626 vault reentrancy, $3M was at risk Trail of Bits: weAudit (VSCode extension), collaborative note taking & highlight code regions Ecosystem Pascal Caversaccio: Ethereum cypherpunk manifesto ETHGlobal London hackathon winners Enterprise Enterprise Ethereum Alliance new leadership team: Karen Scarbrough - Executive Director, Paul Brody - Chairperson and Vanessa Grellet joins board Google search for an ENS address shows Ether balance Waku is hiring! Protocol Engineer, Waku SDK Software Engineer & Researcher IFT/Logos: ZK Researcher (Nomos); ZK Researcher (Vac) & ZK Engineer x2 Certora is hiring: Head of Product, SR-Rust, Compiler Developer & FV Wizard Devcon: Community Supporter, Production Magician & Volunteer Coordinator 👾OpenZeppelin seeks Security Researchers in Canada, Australia, LatAm & USA TechOps are looking for DevOps. Work on projects such as MakerDAO. ChainSafe seek a Head of Protocol Engineering Job listings: $600 for 4 issues (75 char limit). Pay using 3cities. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail Onchain stats Gas fees (via ultrasound.money): 16.4 to 121.8 gwei, with 32.4 gwei average Zero net issuance currently at 22.8 gwei 7k ETH net burn this week ETHUSD: $3,107 - $3,757, currently $3,305 ETHBTC: currently 0.052 (Flippening at ~0.16) Notable at app layer BlackRock USD institutional digital liquidity fund (BUIDL), stable token pays dividends in tokens monthly for qualified investors Nexus Mutual bundled protocol cover, protection for multiple protocols under a single listing Regulation/business/tokens Ethereum is first (“profitable”) chain where burned transaction fees are greater than lifetime issuance Fortune: SEC issues subpoenas regarding dealings with EF EF removed warrant canary from website in Feb 26 commit: “received a voluntary enquiry from a state authority that included a requirement for confidentiality” SEC sanctioned for bad faith conduct in DEBT Box case Genesis $21M settlement with SEC for charges of unregistered offer & sale of securities General Polygon PoS added secp256r1 curve precompile (RIP7212) GoFetch: side channel attack using data memory-dependent prefetchers in Apple silicon END OF SERVICE: plan to deprecate Week in Ethereum News Editor: @abcoathup Follow @WeekinEthNews for the most clicked links Permalink: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-march-23-2024 (new/changes in bold) Mar 27-30 – ETH Bucharest conference & hackathon Mar 29-31 – ETH Seoul hackathon Apr 5-26 – ETHGlobal Scaling Ethereum virtual hackathon Apr 5-7 – EthereumZuri.ch conference Apr 12-14 – ETHDam (Amsterdam) conference & hackathon Apr 16-18 – EY Global blockchain summit (London) Apr 19-21 – ETH Tallinn hackathon Apr 23-May 7 – Gitcoin Grants 20 Apr 26-28 – ETHBoston hackathon & conference May 3-5 – ETHGlobal Sydney hackathon May 21-23 – DappCon (Berlin) May 24-26 – ETHBerlin hackathon May 31-Jun 2 – ETHDublin hackathon & conference May 31-Jun 2 – ETHPrague conference & hackathon May 31-Jun 5 – ETH Belgrade hackathon & conference Jun 14 – EF EIP4844 data challenge deadline Jul 8-11 – EthCC (Brussels) conference Jul 12-14 – ETHGlobal Brussels hackathon Jul 26-30 – EDCON Tokyo conference Aug 23-Sep 13 – ETHGlobal ETHOnline virtual hackathon Aug 29-31 – ETHAccra hackathon Sep 12-14 – NapulETH (Napoli) Sep 20-22 – ETHGlobal Singapore hackathon Oct 6-8 – ETHRome Oct 18-20 – ETHGlobal San Francisco hackathon Nov 12-15 – Devcon 7 - Southeast Asia (Bangkok) Nov 15-17 – ETHGlobal Bangkok hackathon Sign up to receive this newsletter weekly ## Comments **tim**: Just looked through the links here and I can proudly say that we covered a fair bit of them ourselves with Kiwi, which is a great achievement!