Hello everyone and welcome to my favourite time of the week — the time where we review the note-worthy dev from last week. We will look at few bugfix updates, a new tool for reviewing the flow of transactions, emerging Infura competitor and article reviewing architecting of trustless non-custodial exchange.
Languages, Tools and Libraries updates
Solidity 0.5.6 Released
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The Solidity team has been on fire this week and after treating us to an update last week, we’ve been surprised with a new Solidity update this week too. Solidity 0.5.6 was released as a bugfix release to an optimiser bug in 0.5.5 resulting in overflows when using certain operations. Although probably no contracts have been exposed to this bug, the Solidity team urges everyone to move to 0.5.6 asap. In addition there are further advancements in the SMTChecker and AbiEncoder v2.
For the contents of the previous release check the previous episode here:
Truffle 5.0.8 Released
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Truffle has released a new version of their framework — 5.0.8. This version comes with several fixes and improvements on the framework. The most notable change is on the improved support of vyper contracts and their unit testing usability.
Libraries, Tools, Infrastructure
TxFlow — Trace your transaction flow inside and between contracts
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One of the most exciting tools coming out of ETHParis is called TxFlow, developed by the awesome team at Tenderly. TxFlow allows you to trace the flow of a transaction inside and outside of contracts.
By simply inputing your transaction hash of the transaction you want to trace, you are able to see the stack of executions in a nice visual way. I do hope we are going to see more of this tool in the next months.
As far as I’ve seen, this tool might require a certain modification of the geth node, but hopefully this can be made work with a regular released geth and parity.
Nodesmith Ethereum beta
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On the matter of nodes, a new player has emerged at the infrastructure as a service scene to compete with Infura.
The company is called Nodesmith and they have released their beta version of their tool with support for (except Mainnet, though).
Nodesmith, as expected, support and handle JSON RPC calls like any node. In addition they have an exciting feature of event caching — feature that I’ve seen multiple projects being forced to implement themselves. Another exciting claim is that their architecture is supposed to be cloud provider agnostic with tons of engineering put behind to make it true.
Exciting things that they’ve planned ahead are:
- IPFS node as a service
- Webhooks API
- Hosted side-chains and bridges
Tutorials & Articles
Trustless, Noncustodial Exchange Prototype
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Last but not least, a new exciting read by enuma.io has been published. The topic at hand is an overview of how one can create trustless non-custodial exchanges.
The gist of it is creating a plasma-like layer 2 solution. The operator serves and maintains the balances of the users while committing to a Merkle Tree root of the balances they maintain. The clients are required to log in at least once a day in order to verify and dispute if needed.
Such an architecture provides both security and performance to the system. The tradeoff comes in the liveness requirement for the users of this system.
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Published at Mon, 18 Mar 2019 06:17:19 +0000
