Crypto Trends
A summary of the crypto trends for the week.
Medalla - community ETH2 testnet
Medalla (named after a Buenos Aires station) is an ETH2 testnet for the community and will start on (or after if there aren’t enough deposits) 1pm UTC on 4th August 2020.
To encourage trying the different clients, there will be POAP badges for running clients in the first two weeks.
There are also attacknets (small single client networks) waiting to be attacked.
Backrunning spam
Backrunning is the strategy of getting a transaction to be the next transaction after a transaction that would benefit you (such as a liquidation immediately following an oracle price update). To get a transaction immediately after, the gas price should be exactly the same.
The issue is that Geth sorts transactions by gas price and then transactions with the same gas price by random ordering. To increase the chances of winning the contest to be immediately after, multiple transactions are being sent, with the non-winners effectively being spam.
Philippe Castonguay explains:
There is a GitHub issue on Geth to address the random ordering to remove the spam game:
Transaction fees
Network congestion continues (90 Gwei as I write this: https://www.ethgasstation.info/).
Whilst this is a driver for Layer 2 scaling solutions (as only high value transactions are worthwhile on Layer 1 in this market) and fee reform (EIP 1559).
Vitalik raises network security as an issue:
For detailed news see: Week in Ethereum News, EthHub, The daily GWEI and What’s New in Eth2
*Archive: Crypto Trends
Audits
From the archives:
Please contact the team when you are ready to request an audit!
Postmortem
Blocknative provide a postmortem on Black Thursday:
Events
- [Expanded with new dates] #FuturePROOF - Virtual - 22 & 23 August 2020
Finally
The original concept of the decentralized web was building on the three pillars of consensus (Ethereum blockchain), messaging (Whisper) and storage (Swarm).
Swarm is now multi-chain and Status is working on Waku a fork of Whisper.