Weekly General Discussion - July 17, 2023 <-> July 23, 2023

(crossposted from r/ethfinance - would love to see more action here)

EthCC day 1 recap

Notable talks:

"MEV, toxic flow and its consequences" by Robert Paluba (0x).

A very interesting deep-dive into the analytics they have done on mev strategies for the biggest UniswapV3 pool, ETH/USDC. In the past three months hft market makers have taken over mev for this pool completely and pushed sandwich bots into unprofitable territory. It's just a handful of entities with deep pockets now that run the show and by combining dex/cex arbitrage with transaction frontrunning and block building. Surprisingly, this actually improved slippage for end-users but takes revenue away from other LPs in the pool.

"Introducing Lens Protocol V2" by Stani Kulechov (Aave)

Lens gets a bunch of new features including "actions" and a composable nft-based identity. There still is a waitlist for new users though.

"From self custody wallets to self custody payment - annoucing Gnosis Pay" by Martin Köppelmann (Gnosis)

The just-launched Gnosis Pay combines a Gnosis Safe wallet with real-world fiat payments via visa card or sepa bank transfers, all in a convenient dapp. They utilize a Polygon zkEvm L2 settled on Gnosis chain L1. Early access preorders for the visa card are available for EU residents via a POAP given out during the talk. To me this looks like an exciting product where a lot of puzzle pieces suddenly fall into place for a great user experience, I will definitely order the card to replace my cex visacard (sorry Bitpanda).

• youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN9qMVkkjx4
• poap: https://poap.website/gnosis-pay

"Lessons from a seasoned web3 security firm" by Mehdi Zerouali (Sigma Prime)

Good overview over smart contract security best practices. Sigma Prime also just published a lot of their audit reports, and they offer 8-12 week internships in case anyone is interested.

"Introducing Uniswap v4" by Alice Henshaw and Sara Reynolds (Uniswap Labs)

V4 allows extensive pool customization with smart contract hooks for all important pool interactions. The new singleton contract design optimizes gas usage while "flash accounting" helps with transactions spanning multiple pools (sorry, didn't quite understand the example they provided).

"The New Frontier of Liquid Staking" by Jordan Sutcliffe (StakeWise)

Stakewise V3 has exciting new features: staking vaults are highly customizable and enable "white label" liquid staking solutions for all kinds of organizations. You can mint 111% overcollaterized osETH tokens against your staking deposits and use them in defi. They currently run a public testnet (pacific.stakewise.io) and are eager for feedback from users.

"The Verge: Converting the Ethereum state to Verkle trees" by Guillaume Ballet (Ethereum Foundation)

Description of the different possible strategies for bringing verkle trees to Ethereum. Migrating the existing Merkle-Patricia-Tree state is computationally expensive and will probably need to be done gradually over the course of weeks of months with high gas prices.

Random observations

• the sponsor stalls in building B are in a big hall with super high noise level, making it hard to have meaningful conversations
• the nethermind devs said snap sync should take only a couple of hours, so there was definitely something wrong when my resync a couple weeks ago took 6 days to complete. They recommended bringing this up in their discord
• I have neglected getting a party invite for today and will instead hit the climbing gym :)