#ethers.js course

[101blockchainss]

101 Blockchain launched the new Ether.JS Blockchain Developer Course. This tutorial is designed for students to learn how to interact with blockchains via specialized API queries using ethers.js.

[marketingaiblogs]

Best Tools and Frameworks for Blockchain Development in 2025

Blockchain technology continues to evolve in 2025, with developers seeking robust tools and frameworks to streamline the creation of decentralized applications (DApps), smart contracts, and other blockchain solutions. As the demand for scalable, secure, and efficient blockchain solutions grows, leveraging the right tools has become essential for success. Here are the top tools and frameworks for blockchain development in 2025.

1. Solidity

Solidity remains the cornerstone for blockchain developers working on Ethereum-based projects. It is a statically typed programming language specifically designed for writing smart contracts. With extensive community support and comprehensive documentation, Solidity allows developers to create secure and reliable DApps. Updates in 2025 have improved its debugging capabilities and compatibility with Ethereum Layer 2 solutions.

Key Features:

Extensive libraries for contract development.

Strong community support.

Optimized for Ethereum and EVM-compatible chains.

2. Hardhat

Hardhat is a versatile Ethereum development environment, essential for testing, deploying, and debugging smart contracts. It supports Solidity and integrates seamlessly with popular tools like Ethers.js. Hardhat’s debugging features and customizability have made it a go-to framework for developers in 2025.

Key Features:

Rich plugin ecosystem.

Advanced error reporting for Solidity.

Local blockchain network for testing.

3. Truffle Suite

Truffle Suite offers a complete development environment for blockchain applications, including testing, debugging, and deployment. The suite includes:

Truffle: A development framework.

Ganache: A personal blockchain for testing.

Drizzle: Front-end libraries for DApp interaction.

In 2025, Truffle’s integration with Layer 2 solutions and multi-chain compatibility have further strengthened its position as a leading blockchain tool.

Key Features:

Simplified contract lifecycle management.

Strong testing tools.

Integrated developer workflow.

4. Remix IDE

Remix is an open-source web-based IDE for Ethereum smart contract development. It is especially popular among beginners due to its user-friendly interface. Remix now supports advanced debugging features, plugin extensions, and deployment on multiple Ethereum testnets.

Key Features:

Browser-based accessibility.

Supports Solidity and Vyper.

Comprehensive debugging tools.

5. Hyperledger Fabric

Hyperledger Fabric is the top choice for enterprise blockchain solutions. It provides a modular architecture, making it suitable for industries like finance, healthcare, and supply chain. Fabric’s private blockchain network capabilities and scalability enhancements in 2025 have positioned it as a leader in permissioned blockchain frameworks.

Key Features:

Modular and customizable architecture.

High transaction throughput.

Strong privacy and security measures.

Explore AICERT’s wide range of AI and Blockchain certifications, and don’t forget to use the code NEWUSERS25 for a 25% discount on all courses. Click here to start your journey into AI and Blockchain today!

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6. Web3.js and Ether.js

Both Web3.js and Ethers.js are JavaScript libraries that facilitate interaction with Ethereum networks. Developers use these tools to build front-end interfaces for blockchain applications. In 2025, their support for multi-chain networks and integration with DeFi protocols has made them indispensable.

Key Features:

Simplified DApp development.

Support for various Ethereum-based protocols.

Comprehensive documentation.

7. Polkadot.js

Polkadot.js is a suite of tools for interacting with the Polkadot ecosystem. It includes libraries and UI interfaces for developing and managing parachains. With Polkadot gaining traction in 2025, this toolset is essential for developers building interoperable blockchain solutions.

Key Features:

Comprehensive support for Polkadot’s ecosystem.

API for blockchain interaction.

Lightweight and efficient.

8. Substrate

Substrate powers Polkadot’s ecosystem and enables developers to build custom blockchains. Its flexibility, along with updated features like enhanced scalability and cross-chain compatibility in 2025, makes it a top choice for blockchain developers.

Key Features:

Framework for building interoperable blockchains.

Pre-built modules for easy customization.

Strong community and documentation.

9. Alchemy

Alchemy is a blockchain infrastructure provider that simplifies DApp development with powerful APIs and tools. In 2025, Alchemy’s services have expanded to include advanced analytics and debugging for multiple blockchain networks.

Key Features:

Real-time analytics and monitoring.

Scalable API services.

Multi-chain compatibility.

10. IPFS (InterPlanetary File System)

IPFS is a distributed file system that enables decentralized data storage and sharing, a critical component of many blockchain applications. In 2025, IPFS’s advancements in performance and security have made it even more appealing for developers.

Key Features:

Peer-to-peer file sharing.

Efficient and secure data storage.

Interoperability with blockchain networks.

Conclusion

As blockchain development matures in 2025, these tools and frameworks empower developers to build innovative, scalable, and secure blockchain solutions. From Solidity for smart contracts to Substrate for custom blockchains, each tool offers unique benefits tailored to specific use cases. By leveraging the right combination of these tools, developers can stay ahead in the competitive blockchain landscape.

Optimize Your Blockchain Projects Today! Choose the best tools and frameworks to streamline your development process and achieve your blockchain goals in 2025.

[101blockchians]

How do I become an Ethereum developer?

Becoming an Ethereum developer involves acquiring the necessary skills and knowledge to build decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. 

Here are the steps you can follow to become an Ethereum developer:

Understand Blockchain Basics:

Start by gaining a solid understanding of blockchain technology, its underlying principles, and how Ethereum fits into the blockchain ecosystem. Study the concepts of decentralization, consensus mechanisms, and smart contracts.

Learn Programming Languages:

Ethereum primarily uses two programming languages for smart contract development:

Solidity

 Vyper

Get Familiar with Ethereum Tools and Libraries:

Ethereum has a rich ecosystem of tools and libraries that simplify development. Some essential ones include:

Truffle

Remix

Web3.js or ethers.js.

Infura or Alchemy

Set Up a Development Environment:

Install and configure the necessary software and tools on your computer. This includes a code editor, a development blockchain network (e.g., Ganache), and the Ethereum client (e.g., Geth or Parity).

Start Building Small Projects:

Begin with simple smart contracts and dApps to apply what you've learned. Experimenting with small projects will help you gain practical experience and confidence.

Study Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs):

Ethereum is continually evolving, and you should keep up to date with the latest proposals and upgrades. EIPs are documents that describe standards, improvements, and new features for Ethereum. Understanding them is crucial for staying current.

Join the Ethereum Community:

Engage with the Ethereum community by participating in forums, attending meetups, and joining relevant online communities (e.g., Reddit's r/ethereum or Ethereum Stack Exchange). Networking with other developers can be invaluable.

Contribute to Open Source Projects:

Consider contributing to open-source Ethereum projects. It's a great way to gain experience, collaborate with other developers, and learn from experts in the field.

Stay Updated:

Stay informed about the latest developments in Ethereum and blockchain technology through blogs, newsletters, podcasts, and conferences.

Build a Portfolio:

As you gain experience, build a portfolio showcasing your projects and contributions. A strong portfolio can help you land Ethereum development jobs or freelance opportunities.

Seek Ethereum Developer Jobs or Freelance Work:

Look for job openings or freelance opportunities in the blockchain and Ethereum development space. Websites like LinkedIn, Ethereum job boards, and freelance platforms can be good places to start your job search.

Keep Learning and Growing:

The blockchain space is continually evolving, so it's essential to keep learning and improving your skills. Consider pursuing advanced topics like DeFi (Decentralized Finance), NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), and layer 2 scaling solutions.

Last Words

Remember that becoming a proficient Ethereum developer takes time and dedication. Continuously improving your skills and staying updated with the latest trends and developments in the blockchain industry will set you on the path to success as an Ethereum developer.

Start your journey today to become an Ethereum developer, Enroll now in 101 Blockchains Ethereum Course!

[evanvanness]

Annotated edition of May 10 Week in Ethereum News

I’ve started thinking of the annotated version as aimed at Eth holders.  There’s a large group of people who hold ETH who want to stay up to date on what is happening, but also have jobs outside of the industry and may not understand all the tech nuances nor have time to spend.  So the annotated edition will try to give you more narrative, more context, some opinion, maybe some 🌶️, as well as pointers to what might you want to read

Fun fact: you can find the #MostClicked and #MuchClicked on Twitter by just searching the hashtags. The usual caveats apply: the things most clicked are the things people hadn’t otherwise seen (not necessarily the most important), and my tweets auto-delete after a month or two, so the data only goes back a couple months.

Before clicking send, I knew for sure which would be the most clicked item this week.  I was right.

How did I know it would be the most clicked?  Because even among Ethereum enthusiasts it’s an undercommunicated thing how low eth issuance will be.  It is planned to sustainably be so low that it might at some points go negative (and perhaps be negative over long periods of time, which worries me a little!).  Perhaps part of the reason we don’t communicate this that loudly is because we just aren’t there yet.   But unlike Bitcoin which has no path to long-term sustainability, Eth has a logical plan to have very low issuance.  

As I said, I forgot this last week, but if I were clicking a few things this week:

chart of ETH issuance over time

A review of hardware for eth staking

MyCrypto’s history of Eth hard forks to celebrate 10m blocks

I might also check out the stuff about personal tokens, because personal money is an interesting subject to think about, even if you’re skeptical like I am.  The idea of “what is money” can take you down some fun intellectual rabbit holes: 

75 interesting uses of social money by Roll 

Personal tokens were the topic du jour, check out this overview from Dan Finlay

A little light this week on the high-level stuff.  The chart of Eth issuance I already discussed.  The hardware for Eth staking is a worthwhile jumping off point if you’re planning on staking.   And the hard fork history is worth knowing, or if you know it, then it’s a fun trip down memory lane.

Eth1

Step by step guide to running a Hyperledger Besu node on mainnet

Nethermind v1.18.30 query the chain and trace transactions within minutes with Beam sync

A primer on block witnesses

Installation guide to running eth1 nodes (or eth2 testnet) on RaspberryPi4

So this week we have a guide to running the ConseSys’s Besu client (part of Hyperledger) which is a Java client aimed at enterprise, but which can run mainnet.   More Nethermind and Besu nodes are good for client diversity.  So is OpenEthereum (formerly known as Parity), which had a release yesterday.

And if you like running nodes on RaspberryPi4, check that out.

This newsletter is made possible by Celer!

Celer has just released a new state channel mainnet upgrade enabling everyone to easily run a layer-2 state channel node and to utilize the low-cost and real-time transactions enabled by Celer. Game developers with no blockchain knowledge today monetize their games through CelerX gaming SDK that leverages the underlying layer-2 scaling technology with ease. Celer has also released the world’s first skill-based real money game apps where players can join multi-player game tournaments and win cryptocurrency prizes, Follow us on twitter, blog, discord and telegram.

Yay, thanks Celer! 

Eth2

Danny Ryan’s latest quick eth2 update – bug bounties doubled, latest IETF BLS standard

PegaSys’s Teku client is now syncing the Schlesi testnet – which has been much more stable than expected

Latest Prysmatic client update – reducing RAM usage, slashing protection

SigmaPrime’s Beacon fuzzer update, struct-aware, bugs found in Teku and Nimbus

Latest Eth2 networking call, gossipsub v1.1. Ben’s notes

Python notebook to simulate a network partition

Apostille, an Eth1x64 variant

Scoping what is necessary to port eth1 to an eth2 shard and turn off proof of work

Lots of talk of go-live this week. Is it July, q3, or q4?  We need to get audit reports and have multi-client testnets running long-term, though last I checked the Schlesi testnet has been quite stable.  And since publishing the newsletter, now PegaSys’s Teku client is fully validating on Schlesi.

Layer2

Demo of Synthetix on the OVM includes paper trading competition with 50k SNX prizepool. The details of how the Optimistic Virtual Machine enables EVM-in-EVM

Gods Unchained building an NFT exchange with StarkWare

Exit games in state channels

Celer Network’s Orion upgrade makes it easy to run a state channel node

I’m going to set up a Celer node later this week if I have a chance.

Also check out the Synthetix trading competition and help stress test the OVM.

Stuff for developers

Solidity v0.6.7, EIP165 (standard interface detection) support. Also survey results on what devs love and hate about Solidity

Solhint v3 – Solidity linter removes styling rules and recommends prettier Solidity instead

Open Zeppelin ethers.js based console

Etherplex: batch multiple JSON RPC calls into single call

Time-based Solidity tests with Brownie

MythX now has 46 detectors

Quiknode has an online tool to test endpoints

Reading Eth price from Maker’s medianizer v1

Build an app with Sablier’s constant streaming tutorial

Building a bot using MelonJS to automate your Melon fund

StarkWare found a vulnerability in Loopring’s frontend where passwords were being hashed to only 32 bit integers

Even the frontend bugs can get you!  

Ecosystem

A chart of ETH issuance over time. The best I’ve seen

Ethereum Foundation’s q1 grants list

A guide to bulk renewing your ENS names

ethereum.org looking for Vietnamese, Thai, Danish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Finnish, or Ukranian translators

A review of hardware for eth staking

A reminder that many ENS names have now expired and need to be renewed! There’s a 90 day grace period, but do it before you forget.

Enterprise

PegaSys’s Hyperledger Besu suite available on Azure Marketplace and Microsoft’s blockchain devkit now supports Besu

Quorum v2.6 – breaking database schema changes, update to geth v1.9.x

Microsoft continues to make the Ethereum dev experience better, with their VScode extension. 

Governance, DAOs, and standards

How to start a MolochDAO

Options for delegated voting in KyberDAO

EIP2633: Formalized upgradable governance

EIP2628: Header in StatusMessage

I oppose any sort of “formalized upgradeable governance” and I think most do.

Application layer

Use POAP for sybil-resistant voting or to determine Discord channel access

Yield: a revised implementation of Dan Robinson’s yTokens for fixed rate, fixed term loans that give a yield curve

Comparing total value locked in DeFi to unique active addresses

75 interesting uses of social money by Roll

Personal tokens were the topic du jour, check out this overview from Dan Finlay

Strike: perpetual swaps with 20x leverage

POAP as a quasi-KYC layer is pretty interesting to me.  Seems like there are some good uses in Ethereum land.

i’m excited to hear that DeFi will get a yield curve!

Tokens/Business/Regulation

Nic Carter: are stablecoins parasitic or beneficial?

OpenRaise: a continuous offering fundraiser for DAOs

dxDAO’s kickstarter using OpenRaise sold out before public announcement – though the curve is still live, plus a secondary Uniswap market

dxDao’s token is an interesting bit.  Most of the token supply goes to the DXDAO, but it’s an interesting experiment in building completely decentralized apps as a Dao with a community that lately has been burgeoning.  It’s also a bit of a check on rent-seeking because it is a credible threat to excessive fees.

One fun note is that the Uniswap market occurred almost immediately and (almost by definition) trades at a substantial discount to the main market.

General

Aggregatable Subvector Commitments, the future may not involve Merkle trees

This week, Ethereum mined its 10 millionth block.

Here’s MyCrypto’s history of Eth hard forks to celebrate 10m blocks

IPFS releases Testground suite for p2p networking tests

PayPal blocked tokenized real estate startup RealT despite a lack of chargebacks, so they’re switching to Wyre

10,000,000 blocks of Ethereum mainnet!

Capricious censorship in web2 and payments!  I’ve been in PayPal’s shoes managing a card not present merchant account, and so I’m somewhat understanding to them.  You’re trying to keep your fraud rate down in a system that sometimes seems rigged against you.  In RealT’s case, they likely also had large amounts coming through which combined with crypto seems scary to Paypal, even with a low chargeback rate.  

It’s not really anyone’s fault.  The system sucks, and this is why Ethereum matters.

Final note that you can see below in the calendar: RAC’s $TAPE dropped yesterday.  It’s a tradable ERC20 token sold on Uniswap (ie, a pre-set price curve).   Of course the price went from $20 to $1000, as the token is redeemable for a limited edition cassette tape of RAC’s new album Boy.

Housekeeping

Did you get forwarded this newsletter?  Sign up to receive it weekly

Permalink: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-may-10-2020/

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):

May 11 – RAC’s $TAPE

May 12 – MakerDAO Sai shutdown deadline

May 22-31 – Ethereum Madrid public health virtual hackathon

May 29-June 16 – SOSHackathon

June 17 – EthBarcelona R&D workshop

[101blockchainss]

Ethers.Js Course | 101 Blockchains

At 101 blockchains, browse our new Ethers. js course. If you are new to Ethereum, this tutorial gives you complete guidance from the basic to the advanced level, and our experts will clear all your doubts regarding this.

[101blockchainss]

101 Blockchains has launched its new Ether.Js Blockchain Developer Course recently. This tutorial will help students learn Ethereum dApp development and interact with the blockchain via specialized API queries using ethers.js.

[evanvanness]

Annotated edition, Week in Ethereum News, April 13 issue

The newsletter didn’t get sent until Monday morning, so a bit late for me.  The reason why is that last week I was busy securing the 4 major sponsors necessary to keep this newsletter free for everyone.  Hopefully news on that front will be coming soon.  I’ll be very grateful to the folks who help Week in Ethereum News stay free, and hopefully you will be too.  As I’ve told everyone I talked to, as an editor, the product will remain the exact same.  As a publisher, it’s very important to me that it’s a productive relationship for everyone.

Here’s the most clicked, preserved in a screenshot since my tweets auto-delete

People are excited that the fee market is getting simulated.  This particular piece is probably a bit too simplistic, but Barnabe will be publishing more soon, with more realistic assumptions about endogenous demand.   

People are excited because the fee market change will 1) make it easier for app devs to get their user transactions included and 2) because every transaction will burn some ETH, and 3) it kills economic abstraction forever, something I remember Gavin pushing quite hard in 2015 and 2016.

Meanwhile, Danny published a design on turning off PoW.   Even though it’s long, it’s still rough and just an initial plan.  The focus has been on launching the eth2 chain, but as soon as it is launched, the goal is to turn off the wasteful electricity burn (and issuance!) of PoW.

Eth1

EIP1559 fee market change simulations, assuming demand is exogenous

EVM Bytecode Merklization – merklize code chunks for block witnesses, estimates 40-60% reduction

Some more estimates on code merklization based on recent blocks

One important bit of stateless Ethereum is trying to merklize code chunks to shrink the witness size so that full nodes do not have to hold the full state.  Two different estimates published this week on how important and feasible it is.

Eth2

Bitfly’s explanations of eth2 block explorer charts

PegaSys’s Teku client fully syncs with the Lighthouse testnet

Latest Nimbus client update. Getting up to the multi-client testnet spec, networking improvements, interop ready with Lighthouse

SigmaPrime’s update fuzzing the eth2 clients. Catching bugs, new fuzzing engine

Work on formally verifying the eth2 spec using Dafny

A look at the GUI for Rocketpool’s decentralized staking pool

Aditya’s how FFG is implemented in Eth2 explainer

The clients are all speeding into launching the multi-client testnet.   I suppose the other stuff mostly speaks for itself.

Eth2, post-BeaconChain launch

A design for merging eth1 and eth2 clients to turn off PoW

Better attestation aggregation algos

Verifiable precompiled contracts

An approach for cross-shard transfers at EE level

Perhaps people forget that when Ethereum launched in July 2015, it didn’t actually do anything.  It’ll be the same with Eth2, so on the research front things shifted awhile ago towards all the things necessary to make eth2 work.

Stuff for developers

Solidity v0.6.6 and v0.6.5 – ‘immutable’ new major feature, tuple assignment bugfix, and memory array creation overflow bugfix

Truffle v5.1.21 adds Solidity’s immutable

wighawag’s Buidler Deployment Plugin

Not new, but a comparison of ethers.js and web3js

Example of using web3modal (former web3connect) with vanilla Javascript

MelonJS v1 to interact with Melon’s deployed code

Tool for decoding Ethereum storage

Arrays and maps in Solidity

Yul+ Remix plugin

Chainlink redeployed ETHUSD contract; 2 weeks to migrate from old code

Maintaining offchain NFT data using IPFS

SQL queries on DuneAnalytics tutorial

Django with web3py tutorial

Lots of devs excited about immutable.  

One problem Ethereum has is that everyone prefers RicMoo’s ethers.js yet most people still use web3js because the tutorials push new devs to it.   

Ecosystem

discv5: an explainer of Eth networking’s peer discovery protocol

Eth brand survey

I really appreciate Dean’s networking explainers, I find them quite well-written, and it makes me a little mad that he’s a high school dropout who writes better than I do.  

Enterprise

from the founder of Simple, Sila: payments API to take on ACH

EEA mainnet survey

Hyperledger Besu v1.4.3 – adds eth/65 for better networking, issue found for private transactions created with v1.3.4 and before

Besu now running eth/65 too, which as we found out a few weeks ago, cuts bandwidth usage by a crazy amount.   A nice change from Péter Szilágyi. 

Governance, DAOs, and standards

MakerDAO’s 13 improvement proposals to decentralize governance

TheLAO launches April 28

how to create a bankless DAO

EIP2593: Escalator algo fee market change

This week a lawsuit was filed against Maker.  Personally I think if you’re running to the US courts to bail you out (or assisting that effort) of your use of leverage, then you deserve all the opprobrium that you get.

Application layer

Reddit is rolling out the tokenization of it its karma for more than just r/EthTrader?

Status v1.2, adds Waku to replace Whisper for better messaging

SmokeSignal.eth, post by burning Dai interface prioritizes higher burn

Autumated dollar cost averaging of your stablecoins on Uniswap

Suggestions and programs in Colony

Overview of DxDAO’s Omen prediction markets

Inspect, DeFi transparency registry

Fairmint’s continuous securities offering is live on mainnet

The Reddit thing seems like an unintentional leak, where they were trying to roll it out to just one more community but it got in the app, and now they’re unsure what to do it.   But they’ve been playing with this for years - I believe a job listing first surfaced for a dev to play with this stuff in late 2016 (may have been early 2017)

My weekly DeFi ratio: i’ll call it 3/8 to be DeFi, which is lower than normal.  On the other, the BTC++ could have very easily been in this section (it’s all a bit arbitrary, no?) as well as the 10 Dai use cases post, etc... which would have changed it quite a bit.

Tokens/Business/Regulation

PieDAO’s BTC++ is live on mainnet, a token of comprised of multiple versions of locked/synthetic BTC

Is tokenized BTC on Ethereum good for ETH?

Top 10 use cases of Dai

NFTScribe – attach a message onchain to an NFT while you own it

a16zcrypto: crypto’s biz model isn’t that different but who benefits is

Jesse Walden’s article is now the #2 most clicked - by the time I do the #MostClicked, it’s usually pretty steady, but this time it moved up quite a bit in the subsequent 24 hours.

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines suggests the answer is no, but of course the answer is actually yes.  People using ETH is a good thing, even if it is to speculate on the price of unsustainable memecoins.  It’s impressive how many people are finding different ways to bring the orange memecoin into ETH, using different trust assumptions on BTC side or different use cases.  

Case in point: Atomic Loans did a big push yesterday, where you can lock up BTC and get stablecoins.  Pretty juicy rate to lend at - 9% for USDC and 9.5% for Dai.

General

Chicago DeFi Alliance formed to connect market makers and DeFi startups

CryptoHack: online puzzles to learn cryptography

UTokyo paper on digital courts

You can join the trusted setup ceremony for Semaphore, a zk privacy layer for apps

The CryptoHack site moved up and would have made the most clicked.  Not a shocker that this audience wants to learn more crypto.   Even app devs probably need to learn that the best architecture often involves more crypto and less state storage.

If you haven’t done a trusted setup ceremony, I highly recommend doing one.  Contribute your entropy to the future!   Semaphore is very neat gadget to help app developers be able to add privacy, which is a very needed layer to prevent dystopia.

[evanvanness]

Annotated edition for Week in Ethereum News Feb 9

There’s too much going on in Ethereum for Substack!

This edition was so massive that I found out that Substack (my email provider) has a character limit, because it started giving me warnings when I wasn’t even done.  So to make space, I cut out some of the default language in the bottom sections that few people read.  Probably should switch some of that language up anyway.

Link for standard version of Week in Ethereum News without my commentary.

Eth1

Latest core devs call. Beiko’s notes

EIP1962 generalized elliptic curve and pairing engine implementation in Go

Nethermind v1.6.1 – better tip of the chain tracking and reorg handling, JSON RPC bugfixes

Parity v2.7.2 and the next steps for Parity client maintenance under GPL3 (though reportedly most participants preferred a more permissive license)

Slockit’s Incubed ultralight client server setup wizard

On the core devs call, they’re going over what makes sense to include in the next fork.  The second EIP1962 implementation is the link in here, important because it’s the alternative to the MatterLabs implementation for the generalized precompile.

Nethermind continues to improve with constant releases.   Parity kicked off their “OpenEthereum” transition of the client to the community.  Apparently the DAO idea is on the backburner - if reports on Twitter are to be believed, they would have held the majority of the tokens.  That’s crazy, presumably the idea was that they’d be giving them out over time to the contributors.  It would have been nice to have a better writeup somewhere

Headsup: at some point there is going to be (another) fight over ProgPoW.  It’s an odd beast where both sides are convinced that they have already won - meaning that anger and disgruntled ragequits are almost guaranteed.  

If you’re the sort of person who ragequits because you didn’t get your way, then there’s a reason why forks of Ethereum exist.

Eth2

Danny Ryan’s quick eth2 update – it’s optimization time

What’s New in Eth2

Latest eth2 call. Notes from Mamy and Ben.

Jim McDonald: defining eth2 network metrics

A look at Rocketpool’s GUI

Nimbus’ first mobile testnet on Android. Plus part 2 of building Nimbus on Android.

Eth2 research team ask me anything on Reddit

Rocketpool is currently the 3rd most clicked of this week’s issue.  I’ve been of the opinion that CLI is fine for staking - most people who are willing to stake their ETH at the start can handle a CLI, I think.  Rocketpool is conservatively estimating to go live in Q4 - I imagine that the staking rewards will be substantially higher in q3 pre-rocketpool, and then will go down again around q1 2021 when exchanges/custody services start staking for their customers.

Nimbus mobile testnet is neat.  The idea has always been that you can run a validator on a mobile phone.  It’s happening!

Layer2

Batch Deposits for [op/zk] rollup / mixers / MACI

Matic explains advantages and limitations of Plasma and rollups

A relatively straightforward section this week. 

Stuff for developers

Kendrick Tan’s practical guide to building zk dapps

Kimi Wu’s hands on your first zk dapp

OpenZeppelin contracts v2.5 – with CREATE2, enumerableset and big NFT gas savings

Remix v0.9.3 – you can now test the functionality of receive & fallback functions

ABDK adds a number converter to its online toolkit

ethers.js and Google’s Bigquery

Alethio adds API endpoints for Rinkeby, Kovan and Ropsten testnets, as well as webhooks

MythX, Quantstamp, Runtime Verification, Sooho, SmartDec and ConsenSys Diligence starting Ethereum Trust Alliance, a security rating system for deployed Eth code

Time travel queries using a subgraph from The Graph

Brownie now supports Vyper

Microsoft’s Azure Eth development kit is now generally available

A write up of the bug that Sam Sun found in three of Kyber’s bridge reserves

EthVigil’s interactive tutorials for devs new to Ethereum concepts

3Box Comments and Chatbox plugins now have emojis, likes, and votes

I like to highlight the zk stuff as it’s clearly the future.  

Sam Sun just keeps finding bugs.   

Checkout the EthVigil tutorials.  They look pretty slick!

Though it’s still early days (the standard thing to say on every panel at every crypto conference), a sign of maturity is that things like Microsoft’s Eth dev kit being generally available isn’t an earth shattering headline anymore.  Everyone now knows that all the world’s biggest companies are experimenting with this technology, almost always on Ethereum, yet they’re also often quiet about it.  

It’s usually safe to just replace “blockchain” with “Ethereum” in most MSM headlines.

Ecosystem

Why ENS uses Ethereum and not a new basechain. (Also: ENS’ registry migration is complete)

How Whisper-fork Waku does DNS based discovery

ConsenSys lays off 14% as part of strategic transformation

Matt Leising says he knows who the DAO hacker is

SHPLONK, an explainer of last week’s paper from Boneh, Drake, Fisch, and Gabizon

Matt Leising has identified...the best way to sell a book by claiming that he has  identified the DAO hacker.  He’s been teasing it for a bit.  I sure hope this holds up better than the Newsweek “scoop” identifying Dorian Nakamoto as Satoshi.  After it was clearly debunked, the Newsweek authors kept claiming that their “forensic analysis” was correct.  Embarrassing.  Let’s see the evidence.

The zk naming schemes are great.  Zero knowledge is one of those things that is exploding because of blockchain.

ConsenSys had a round of layoffs this week, though as you see below, it also acquired a municipal bond broker-dealer.  Coverage was actually reasonable - it’s another sign that perhaps this industry is (sometimes) growing up a bit.

Enterprise

ConsenSys acquires Heritage Financial Systems, a municipal bond broker-dealer, to tokenize them on Codefi

Governance and standards

Two articles on DigixDAO dissolution: as an example of DAOs working (though just 58 addresses voted out of 11,000+) and Coinfund looks at the Digix voting power

Why ragequit is game changing

Live on mainnet

Colony is in public beta live on mainnet

First 10,000 zkDai is on Aztec

Mattereum’s asset passports are live on mainnet

District0x’s District Registry is live on mainnet, a TCR for its community

Coronavirus whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang is memorialized on mainnet

AirSwap Delegates is live on mainnet. Configure automated trading rules, onchain limit orders, liquidity integration with Kyber, and ability to add new tokens

I love the idea of Colony and want to get a chance to test it.

I had to break up the app layer section this week because there were just too many things.  Obviously a DeFi heavy list, and many of the things in the next “application layer” section are also on mainnet.  Things are shipping!  The distinction between the two sections was a bit arbitrary, as is always the case.

Application layer

DeFi hit $1 billion USD equivalent locked up

Maker Dai Stability Fee 8%; DSR 7.5%

Data viz on Maker’s Sai to Dai migration success

A spreadsheet of admin keys in DeFi

Etherisc’s flight insurance app returns on Rinkeby testnet using Chainlink

Idle Finance v2 (an autobalancer similar to Staked’s RAY)

Collateral Swap – swap between Maker collateral (eg, ETH<>BAT) with Aave + Uniswap

List of DeFiZaps – one click to do a bunch of DeFi actions

Gelato, a no code bot to automate your Ethereum tasks. Tutorial

Gauntlet’s analysis of why Uniswap is a good oracle

Credentify, an API to issue standard European education credentials stacked into ECTS

Circles’s universal basic income is live on Kovan testnet

Maple Loans undercollateralized loans through communities with the option to slice up the risk CDO-style

Zero Collateral loans with cDai, live on mainnet (but unaudited alpha software)

Dharma’s dtokens – wrappers around Compound tokens, a la rDai, but for services to take profits. In this case, 10% of interest to Dharma

DeFi hitting $1b USD is definitely the story of the week.  Of course there are criticisms you can make (it’s risky, the risks are cascading, there will likely be some kind of crisis at some point, oracles are centralized, etc etc) but as Josh Stark and I wrote in our Year in Ethereum 2019 piece, DeFi is an alternative financial system and in many ways a remarkably better one.   Way less paperwork, much less settlement times, better transparency, not to count the various improvements on censorship-resistance, trustlessness, permissionlessness, etc.

I liked Avichal’s tweet:

Imagine a Fintech startup tweeted: "We launched two years ago. Today we have $1 Billion in collateral and have given out a cumulative of $1B in loans!" Every VC in the world would want to know what the hell the startup does and how it works. 2020 is going to be wild for crypto. pic.twitter.com/yb8gfISSoX

— Avichal Garg (Electric Capital) ⚡ (@avichal)

February 7, 2020

One thing we linked in the Year in Eth piece was a story about a Turkish football star who is now driving for Uber because Erdogan froze his bank accounts in Turkey.  I take the story with a small grain of salt, but it’s a reminder than any wealth you save is...sometimes not really yours if it resides in a bank. 

Unsecured/undercollateralized loans is definitely becoming an area of experimentation, with multiple projects on Ethereum.  

Tokens/Business/Regulation

Hester Peirce speech proposing an SEC safe harbor for tokens

Op-ed: America falling behind the world in blockchain

Viewing GDPR from a blockchain lens

6 central banks to talk digital currency in April

Ethereum needs more entrepreneurs and product people just as much as more devs

Are stablecoins parasites on ETH?

Why ETH will sustain a monetary premium

The SEC should have figured out some kind of safe harbor in 2016, and then we wouldn’t have had the mania and fraud and misallocation of capital that occurred in 2017 that set the space back.   But still, better late than never - though certainly some things have happened outside of the US because of the SEC.  Decentralization in action!

Kames’s article calling for more entrepreneurs is an interesting one.  Is more devs the bottleneck or is it better entrepreneurs?  

I’ve never liked the “monetary premium” angle.    What I do find amusing is how many Bitcoiners point to something written at the peak of BTC’s 2017 bubble where a legacy finance guy tries to get his friends to buy BTC (I hope they ignored him then!) and not ETH with the argument that ETH is intrinsically valuable, but BTC is not, therefore all the value will accrue to BTC.

Only in crypto, folks.

General

Dispelling Bitcoin maximalist myths about Ethereum

a visual introduction to Merkle trees

Accelerating powers-of-tau ceremonies with optimistic pipelining

How does cryptocurrency have value, part 2 of Maker’s intro series

It’s impressive how much fake news is created about Ethereum by Bitcoin maximalists.  I’m convinced that a decent chunk of Bitcoin holders actually think that Ethereum runs on Infura, and another chunk think that an Eth full node needs 10 TB.  A bunch of the crypto clickbait media feeds these falsehoods because they can get cheap clicks from Bitcoiners.   

If you don’t know what a Merkle tree is, check out the intro.  

See you next week.  Somehow I’ll try to get an issue out in the midst of EthDenver.