EVM Gazette – January 5, 2025
Issue #17
Highlights
Lighter released code for operation verification
Vitalik shared a new year’s address
Many new ERCs, including “Bound Signatures” from wjmelements
Patrick Collins resurrected discussion on EIP-831
AllCoreDevs Update
Calls were cancelled for the last while. ACDE in place of ACDT today.
Ethereum News & Discussion
Vitalik published a new blog post arguing that in a world where Big Government, Big Business, and Big Mob are all strengthening, we must preserve balance of power by mandating diffusion—through policies, adversarial interoperability, and pluralistic systems—to enable rapid progress without hegemonic concentration.
The Ethereum Foundation Blog published a new post on hosting Devcon 8 in Mumbai
PatrickAlphaC resurrected discussion on EIP-831
Former EF researcher Dankrad wrote a blog post about a new consensus algorithm by Commonware which, although it requires >80% honesty, it only requires 1 round of voting.
Vitalik wrote a new year’s address on X.
Tevm released the Beta version of Voltaire, a new Ethereum library for “Agentic Coders”.
Research Update
Wormholes and the cost of plausible deniability by mmjahanara, pierre
Argues that Ethereum wormhole designs relying on plausible deniability are fundamentally insecure under 160-bit addresses due to collision-driven inflation risks and constrained anonymity sets (notably in EIP-7503 via beacon_block_root), proposes that fixing anonymity may be feasible but true deniability likely requires rethinking the architecture—potentially via beacon deposit–based primitives—and highlights L1 changes as possible enablers.
Does FHE deserve this much attention? by miha-stopar
Argues that FHE merits significant attention for its unique ability to enable composable, non‑interactive computation over encrypted state without hardware trust—positioned against ZKPs, MPC, and TEEs with distinct trade-offs—yet practical deployment hinges on maturing performance, key‑management and decryption (often via committees), and the emergence of verifiable FHE, which is crucial both for trustless off‑chain execution and for future encrypted AI training and inference.
Demystifying Blockchain KV Lookups: From O(log N) to O(1) Disk I/O by ping-ke, Qi Zhou, Po
Under realistic caching where Bloom filters (excluding LLast) and index metadata fit in memory (~0.1%–0.9% of DB size), Pebble’s random-read key-value lookups empirically exhibit near-constant disk I/O (~1.0–2.4 I/Os per Get) largely independent of database size, challenging the conventional O(log N) assumption and yielding actionable cache sizing guidelines for blockchain execution-layer storage.
New EIPs/ERCs
EIP-8115 – Batch priority fees at end of block
EIP-8116 – Replace cumulative receipt fields
ERC-8109 – Diamonds, Simplified
ERC-8110 – Domain Architecture for Diamonds
ERC-8111 – Bound Signatures
ERC-8112 – Token Transfer With Signature
ERC-8113 – Series Accounting for Incentivized Vaults
ERC-8114 – NFT Transfer With Signature
ERC-8117 – Compressed Display Format for Addresses
Client and Client-Related Updates
Prysm released v7.1.2-rc.0
Tooling, Languages & Libraries
Nethereum released 5.8.0
Ape released 0.8.45
Hardhat released v3.1.2 and v2.28.2
These releases add support for Solidity 0.8.32 and 0.8.33
Remix Project released v1.5.1
Alloy released v1.2.1
L2s and EVM Alt-L1s
Gattaca has joined as the ninth member of the Taiko Security Council.
The RISEx public testnet is now live.
Paradex has launched Privacy Perps on mainnet. However, as a consequence of implementation details, this has resulted in the L2 moving from the “Rollups” tab to the “Others” tab on L2Beat.
Lighter posted a thread on X regarding their publishing the code that verifies Lighter operations.