# Week in Ethereum News, July 20, 2024

Source: https://weekinethereum.substack.com/p/week-in-ethereum-news-july-20-2024
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Week-in-Ethereum-News-July-20-2024?index=0x669b6c1476f36c26b94a8e810a3e5fcbe085ea3f4953e5beeb28a58bf9708203922a691a
Submitted by tim on 2024-07-20 UTC, 3 upvotes, 1 comment

## Summary

Week in Ethereum News for July 20, 2024 reports on the Pectra upgrade, security incidents, and market data, and announces that the newsletter itself is being discontinued. Core developers kept EOF in Pectra for now, pending extensive testing and fuzzing across clients, though Geth strongly opposed it. The newsletter reports a $230M WazirX exploit via multisig compromise and a $11.6M LiFi exploit, and says Virgil Griffith's sentence was reduced by 7 months. Spot ETH ETFs are set to launch in the US on July 23, and ETH was trading at $3,488 at the time of writing.

## Article

EOF remains in Pectra for now, Virgil Griffith sentence reduced, spot ETH ETFs launch July 23 in US and WazirX (Indian exchange) $230M exploit

All core devs

All Core Devs - Execution (ACDE) #192:

Pectra (Prague + Electra) upgrade:

Pectra-devnet-1: local testing found some issues, plan to launch Thursday with all clients

EOF:

Remains in Pectra for now, requires extensive testing & fuzzing across clients

Risks of a consensus bug & costs vs benefits debated; Geth strongly against & won’t champion testing/support, Solidity for

Legacy EVM still needs to be supported, migration is years away, if ever

Mainnet still sets defaults for L2s, L2s won’t lead yet

EIP7702: spec unchanged for now, discussed CODERESET proposal

Logs for system contracts: review async & decide at next ACDC

EIP7742 decouple blob count for CL/EL: discuss at next ACDC

RIP7212 secp256r1 precompile on L1: review async & decide on inclusion (soon)

Osaka + F starname upgrade

Verkle implementers call #21: proposal to reduce witness size, updates to EIP6800 & EIP2935 and cost of code chunking

Centralization watch: threatening the value of your ETH

🚨 Lido at 29.15%, still too close to 33.3% threshold

Client diversity (via clientdiversity.org):

Execution layer: Geth ~55% majority

Consensus layer: Prysm 35%

Any client bug over 33.3% could mean loss of finality

Potuz: stress of potential consensus bugs on majority client developers

Better geographic diversity is optimal, particularly outside of North America & Europe

Layer 1

Blocknative: data viz of self-built blocks, unintentionally increase base fee volatility

EIP7732 ePBS:

ePBS breakout #5: short call, proposer IP leaks requesting headers from builder and consensus spec tests fixes in progress

Nethermind EVMYulLean: EVM + Yul specification, executable, in Lean

Research

Anders Elowsson: sealed execution auction, Vickrey slot auction of execution proposal rights, attesters supervise commit/reveal scheme facilitated by builders & beacon proposer

Multi-round MEV-Boost: mitigate negatives of based preconfs & retain benefits of based rollups

Client Releases

Consensus layer:

Lodestar v1.20.2: patch for publishing blinded blocks using Lodestar beacon node & Lighthouse/Nimbus validator client with MEV-Boost

Execution layer:

Reth v1.0.3: fix for Base mainnet & async Backfill stream

Layer 2

Scroll delayed finalization to investigate potential ecosystem incident, confirmed Rho Markets was application specific

L2BEAT Badges: visual display of L2 features

EIPs/Standards

EIPs (Ethereum improvement proposals):

EIP7745: Two dimensional log filter data structure

ERCs (application layer standards):

ERC7743: Multi-owner non-fungible tokens (MO-NFT)

ERC7744: Code index (index contract bytecode)

ERC7746: Composable security middleware hooks

EIP.tools adds RIPs (rollup improvement proposals)

Stuff for developers

Solidity via-IR compilation pipeline explainer: translates Solidity into Yul (intermediate representation) for optimization rather than direct to bytecode, plan to make default with EOF

Solidity hidden overflow: math expression types cast to highest type used by variables

Solady (Solidity snippets): adds ERC1967 minimal proxies with immutable args, auto verified on Etherscan

Z0r0z sstore3, read/write contract storage using balance & address, license: AGPL v3

Rindexer, EVM indexing tool in Rust, beta

Reth Execution Extension (ExEx) examples

Echidna v2.2.4: improves fuzzing speed & user experience, adds support for transient opcodes

Audit Wizard adds Cyfrin Aderyn (Solidity static analyzer)

Spice (Python): export data from Dune API

CTFs:

Damn Vulnerable DeFi v4: migrated to Foundry, new challenges: curvy puppet, shards, withdrawal & rewarder

Security

WazirX (Indian exchange) $230M exploit via multisig compromise

LiFi $11.6M exploit on mainnet & Arbitrum via arbitrary call, after contract facet added, infinite approvals impacted

Minterest $1.4M exploit on Mantle L2 via reentrancy

Security Alliance (SEAL): incident response to Squarespace domain compromise

Ecosystem

ETHGlobal Brussels finalists

Enterprise

Enterprise Ethereum Alliance DeFi risk assessment guidelines

EF Protocol Support: generalist to help with ACD, EPF, SoP & more

Nethermind: Senior Device Security Engineer, Senior DevOps Engineer AMER & APAC, Full Stack Lead APAC, Post-Grad Internship & Chief Marketing Officer

EF seek a European/Civil Law qualified Legal Counsel

Aragon: Senior Smart Contract Developer

Job listings: $600 for 4 issues (75 char limit). Pay using 3cities. Questions? abcoathup at-gmail

Onchain stats

Fees (via ultrasound.money):

Gas: 0.9 to 41.7 gwei, 6.8 gwei average; zero net issuance at 23.6 gwei

13k ETH net issuance this week

ETHUSD: $3,121 - $3,538, currently $3,488, all time high $4,878

ETHBTC: currently 0.053 (Flippening at ~0.164)

Regulation/business/tokens

Virgil Griffith sentence reduced by 7 months, should be going home soon

Spot ETH ETFs launch July 23 in US (CETH, FETH, EZET, QETH & ETHV)

General

Fractal ID (KYC) data breach, includes uploaded images/documents

EF updates mailing list compromise was via Google Workspace bug

CrowdStrike update caused Windows hosts to blue screen of death

Craig Wright is not Satoshi, as per legal notice he is required to share

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-july-20-2024

(new/changes in bold)

Jul 29-30 – EDCON Tokyo conference

Aug 2-4 – Ethereum Argentina conference & hackathon

Aug 7-9 – Science of Blockchain Conference (New York)

Aug 15-17 – Ethereum Uruguay hackathon & conference

Aug 23-Sep 13 – ETHGlobal ETHOnline virtual hackathon

Aug 23-26 – ETHTokyo hackathon & conference

Aug 29-31 – ETHAccra hackathon

Sep 5-8 – ETHWarsaw conference & hackathon

Sep 9-15 – ETHSafari (Kenya)

Sep 12-14 – NapulETH (Napoli)

Sep 13-14 – Ethereum México

Sep 20-22 – ETHCapeTown hackathon

Sep 20-22 – ETHGlobal Singapore hackathon

Sep 26-27 – ETHMilan conference

Oct 4-6 – Ethereum Kuala Lumpur conference & hackathon

Oct 4-6 – ETHRome hackathon

Oct 17-19 – ETHSofia conference & hackathon

Oct 18-20 – ETHGlobal San Francisco hackathon

Nov 12-15 – Devcon 7 - Southeast Asia (Bangkok)

Nov 15-17 – ETHGlobal Bangkok hackathon

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## Comments

**tim**: Reading this today I thought that it is actually a very specific flavor of Ethereum news. Kudos to them for sticking to their guns, …or maybe not?
Sometimes I feel like their newsletter would feel more alive if they‘d cover more adjacent topics. And if they‘d remove other topics, like the LST stats, which they have there every week.

But then again, them sticking to their guns and keeping it simple is what made it work. Albeit, it doesn‘t seem to work for them anymore…