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Elevating Ethereum’s Security: ERC-7512 Revolutionizes Smart Contract Auditing

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A new groundbreaking proposal known as Ethereum Request for Comments [ERC]-7512 has emerged on the horizon. The initiative seeks to fortify the security of ETH’s decentralized applications [dApps] by transforming the smart contract auditing landscape, introducing a paradigm shift: shifting from off-chain to on-chain verification of audit information.

In essence, ERC-7512 is designed to allow smart contracts to seamlessly interpret and validate critical audit details, such as the identity of audit initiators and the discoveries they’ve uncovered. Mostly, audit reports in the present scenario are conducted manually by development teams, with no way for on-chain verification of their authenticity.

Ethereum

Behind the ERC-7512 lies the collective work of several well-known developers hailing from renowned projects such as Safe, Ackee Blockchain, OtterSec, ChainSecurity, OpenZeppelin, and Hats Finance. Their collective goal? To usher in a new era of transparency and trust in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Often termed the lifeblood of dApps, smart contracts have remained vulnerable to an array of malevolent threats. To put it bluntly, the first half of 2023 witnessed massive losses exceeding $650 million, all attributed to the sinister realm of DeFi-related scams and cyber heists.

Although conventional audits serve as a first line of defense, achieving foolproof security remains an elusive quest. ERC-7512, according to industry experts, emerges as the long-awaited solution, offering an unprecedented level of on-chain transparency and accountability for audits.

Richard Meissner, co-founder of Safe and one of the masterminds behind ERC-7512, elucidated the urgency of this shift by emphasizing the crucial role it plays in enabling the true potential of permissionless innovation.

While permissionless innovation allows anyone to build anything, for actual use cases to emerge, we need to create a layer that will enable us to verify the security of contracts that interact. This visibility is currently missing.

Ethereum’s Testnet Launch Met Unexpected Delay

Lately, the planned debut of the Holesky testnet faced a delay owing to a human mistake in configuring the initial files. Following the identification and rectification of this misconfiguration, the team opted to reschedule the testnet launch for the upcoming week, aiming to establish uniformity across all parameters.

According to a report by TronWeekly, the primary objective of this fresh testnet was to supplant the current Goerli testnet, providing Ethereum developers with a more pragmatic and expandable testing environment.

Exploring Solana’s DeFi Boom Amidst 70% Price Rally

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Solana, the once-championed Ethereum Killer, has recorded a substantial uptick in smart contract deployment on its platform. The latest chart from data aggregator Artemis showed that SOL’s contracts reached a record year-to-date, with around 152 contracts deployed.

It should be noted that the spike is the second of its kind to occur within a 30-day period, suggesting that new projects are commencing on the platform. One of the most important elements in the development of decentralized finance [DeFi] is smart contracts. Whereas Total Value Locked, or TVL, acts as the key gauge of general support for a given protocol or decentralized application [dApp].

Per a July 14 report, Solana was one of the top 10 networks with the most TVL growth,  with an average daily growth of over 17%, a weekly increase of over 22%, and a monthly surge of over 38%. In addition, the layer-1 network has observed a positive increase in the platform’s user base, indicating notable growth when viewed in the context of other key metrics.

The number of people who are actively using the Solana ecosystem has been trending slightly upward since last week. Looking at the Sol scan data, it was discovered that on July 17, there were about 296k active wallets registered, up from 246k the previous day. Which, however, came up just shy of the 358k+ peak recorded on June 26.

Solana Continues To Expand To More Developer Ecosystems

Overall, Solana’s second quarter of 2023 was marked by a surge in developer activity, with numerous innovative dApps and projects being built on the platform. For instance, Solana opened doors to Ethereum developers with the recent Neon EVM integration.

In the past, layer 2 solutions like rollups or sidechains were frequently utilized by EVM DApps to assure cost efficiency. But now that Neon EVM has been released on Solana, developers have not only an alternative option but also a chance to take advantage of Solana’s astonishingly cheap average transaction cost of just 0.00001 SOL [$0.0002] per transaction.

In contrast, Ethereum charges a transaction fee of about $2 on average. Despite regulatory challenges and numerous delistings, Solana remained resilient and finished as a top 10 crypto asset in Q2. Currently, SOL is trading at $26.35, having risen by over 70% in the past month.

EU’s New Data Act Might Put Smart Contracts Out Of Existence- Crypto Experts

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Legislators in the European Union or EU have reached a consensus on its new contentious Data Act touted to be a “milestone in reshaping the digital space”

The agreement was confirmed by Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, who also noted that the legislation will open the door to a vibrant data economy that is innovative and accepting of its constraints.

Crypto proponents, however, strongly disagree and have expressed worries that the provisions on smart contracts could end up killing the industry.

A specific clause in the act called Article 30 mandates a built-in feature to stop or interrupt transactions, which the industry argued eliminated the permissionless, autonomous, and automatic nature of smart contracts.

But Damian Boeselager, EU negotiator said, “We are no longer addressing smart contracts in general but make this regulation applicable specifically to the execution of contractual clauses in the context of data sharing.”

The commission also brushed off blockchain industry fears, claiming that the new rule won’t invalidate already-existing smart contracts and that its stringent standards shouldn’t pose a practical challenge for suppliers.

However, this hasn’t done much to allay industry worries. Stellar blockchain CEO Denelle Dixon wrote,

In the EU’s push to lead technology regulation, we have seen misfires with overly broad language and unintended impacts before. Unfortunately, the Data Act has the potential to fall into this same trap, effectively regulating smart contracts out of existence.

“The Act could impose unworkable requirements on smart contracts–including mandatory termination and interruption features,” Dixon added.

EU’s Data Act: The Road Ahead

After the successful negotiations, the Data Act will be examined by legal experts over the summer and may be approved by a final vote by September.

According to a source, if it becomes legalized, smart contracts would need to have the option to be turned off, and protocols that ensure transactions might not be able to exist.

Meanwhile, decentralized protocol Stellar has joined industry colleagues to raise the flag in a letter to EU policymakers ahead of tomorrow’s trialogue negotiations.

Solana’s Unique Smart Contracts Rise Despite Network Woes

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In spite of recent network woes, the Solana blockchain’s smart contracts have continued to grow. As per data from Artemis, the number of unique contracts put on SOL’s network in March 2023 was at its highest in the year.

As of March 6th, 2023, nearly 140 new smart contracts were deployed compared to 92 at the beginning of the year.

A smart contract is an automated program that runs on the blockchain and whose main function is to automate the execution of contracts between parties.

A unique contract, on the other hand, is a special kind of smart contract deployment that uses a contract code intended to be one-of-a-kind and unreplicable.

These are used to produce one-of-a-kind digital goods, such as collectibles or artwork, in the context of non-fungible tokens [NFTs]. 

A new NFT collection on the network might appear shortly given the rise in the deployment of unique contracts on Solana.

However, the NFT sales statistics are a bit concerning, as data from CryptoSlam showed that Solana’s NFT sales volume fell by about 30% over the previous month.

Despite the plummeting figures in the volume metric, the number of NFT transactions per program on the blockchain increased in recent times.

One of the biggest NFT marketplaces, Magic Eden, also revealed a comparable rise in transactions per program for Solana.

Additionally, according to data from DeFiLlama, SOL’s network values surged in the TVL count over the past few days.

Anatoly Yakovenko, the CEO and co-founder of Solana, recently presented a roadmap that emphasized speed and scalability improvements while noting that maintaining stability remained a difficulty.

Solana Founder Laid Down A Plan Addressing Network Outage

According to the blog post, till the 1.14 release, core engineers were trying to resolve real-time issues that were affecting the network’s speed and usability.

These issues included invalid gas metering, lack of flow control for transactions and fee markets, spiraling ram, storage, and restart overhead, TronWeekly reported.

“Over the last 12 months, Solana Labs and third-party core engineering teams have also been working to improve the network and will continue to do so with a focus on stability,” the blog read.

Yakovenko’s announcement came after the previous week’s 1.14 network update where the network faced a slowdown in block production on Feb. 25.

The incident caused massive disruptions to transactions and forced validators to downgrade the software in a bid to restore network performance. 

Cardano’s Smart Contracts Surge By Over 350% In 2022

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Cardano’s smart contracts have increased by more than 350% in a year, reaching by 4150 from 958 in January, data from Cardano Blockchain Insights showed.

This indicates developers keep on working in the cryptocurrency’s network, despite the ongoing bear market.

For those new, Plutus is the “smart contract platform of the Cardano blockchain” that allows users to “write applications that interact with the blockchain.”

The Cardano team said they worked on scaling the script capacity, the Plutus Debugger MVP, and finishing the spread of implementation of full Babbage support in the Plutus tools before its release. 

In November, the R&D unit Input Output Global [IOG] announced the launch of the world’s first blockchain decentralization index, followed by the establishment of a new resource section for Plutus DApp developers on the Cardano Docs website.

ADA maintained its momentum by surpassing all crypto platforms in monthly development activity. Last month, activity rates in its public GitHub repositories spiked by 18% higher than the next highest-ranked asset, Polkadot [DOT], recording 572.67 generated events.

In addition to that, the network has recently tapped a new milestone with the launch of its first stablecoin.

EMURGO, the commercial arm of Cardano, unveiled the planned launch of its new dollar-backed stablecoin USDA, touted to be “the first fully fiat-backed, regulatory compliant stablecoin in the ADA ecosystem,” earlier this month.

Meanwhile, founder Charles Hoskinson shot back at naysayers after the leading blockchain saw a boost in the number of smart contracts deployed.

It is important to note that due to the network’s minimal value, opponents have sometimes referred to Cardano as a “ghost chain.”

Cardano Founder Reacts To “Ghost Chain” FUD

In response to these detractors, Hoskinson frequently refers to Cardano’s accomplishments as “ghost” successes. Hoskinson remarked that the network’s usage of “ghost transactions” has been quite beneficial when the network edged Ethereum in terms of transaction volume.

The well-known crypto entrepreneur compared ADA’s delegation transactions to ghost transactions in September. DIGI’s stake pools’ Rick McCracken tweeted that a minimum of 1.2 million transactions take place on the network every five days utilizing zero capacity.

To which the founder quipped, “One could almost say that they are Ghost transactions.” 

As reported by TronWeekly, Hoskinson expressed frustration with Gemini exchange not listing ADA and said it could be related to “bankruptcy and risky behavior.” His comments came amidst the growing clamor to list the token on the platform.

Here Comes Binance Oracle: The Web3 And Blockchain Smart Contracts Connect

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Since its launch, Binance has established a reputation among cryptocurrency enthusiasts. One of the most amazing adventures in the crypto-verse was that of this exchange that came to light in 2017. It has expanded to become one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide.

The cryptocurrency exchange has announced the debut of Binance Oracle, a new data feed network that enables blockchain smart contracts to communicate with actual data, beginning with its own internal blockchain service, BNB Chain.

To begin with, Oracle Network will give BNB Chain users access to current data sources and sophisticated computations through their decentralized apps (DApps) and Web3 ecosystem partners. According to the exchange,

“Over ten BNB Chain projects have already integrated with the Binance Oracle network.”

Other blockchains will eventually have the ability to link smart contracts with off-chain data. Gwendolyn Regina, investment director at BNB Chain, outlined the significance of the network by stating,

“Using oracles to dramatically increase the smart contract’s knowledge of what’s going on outside of the blockchain, allowing it to respond to external events with specified actions will be crucial.”

Additionally, the exchange disclosed the use of regional domains to maintain system uptime in the face of unpredictably occurring worldwide catastrophes. According to CZ’s exchange, the network employs components that assure high dependability, such as an internal Threshold Signature Scheme for each data stream and price aggregation utilizing an algorithm.

As the largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of trading volume, Binance continues to invest in a variety of crypto businesses.

A $500 million fund was introduced on 17 October 2022 by Binance Pool, a mining division of Binance, to provide loans to the cryptocurrency mining sector.

Shibu Inu drops down on Binance

The well-known meme coin Shiba Inu ($SHIB) has recently been spotted ruling the whole cryptocurrency market. The enthusiasm for this community-driven endeavor, though, appeared to be waning. Despite the recent release of its collectible card game, the alternative currency scarcely saw any gains. The meme coin didn’t make it onto Binance’s list of the top 10 trending searches, so it appears that users weren’t too keen on it either.

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Shiba Inu had been ranked 14th on the exchange’s trending searches, according to recently collected data by Crypto Differ. Many people found this to be quite unexpected given the normal zeal on the network.

Cardano App Allows Users To Interact With Smart Contracts

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The Cardano ecosystem is bubbling with a lot of significant updates. Leading crypto hardware wallet provider ‘Ledger’ has recently announced a key upgrade for the ADA app that incorporates the smart contract functionality to the Cardano ecosystem.

In September 2021, the Alonzo hard fork debuted in the Cardano community and for the first time introduced the smart contract component. However, compatibility issues persisted in the app for more than six months.

Finally, on April 26th, Ledger announced that the ADA app had been upgraded to v.4.0.0, and the major highlight is of course the introduction of the smart contract feature to the app. The tweet read,

“The app now provides users with access to the growing Cardano decentralized finance ecosystem via ‘YoROI’ and ‘AdaLite’. Ledger also revealed that, with the upgrade, users can now sign smart contracts on the ADA app.”

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Ledger was co-founded in 2014 by Eric Larchevêque, Nicolas Bacca, Joel Pobeda, and Thomas France. At present, the firm has three crypto hardware wallets under its wing. These are Ledger Nano X, Ledger Nano S, and Ledger Nano S Plus. Its headquarter is located in Paris.

Ledger’s support team too chimed in by declaring that the Ledger Live app is currently working on adding full support for the blockchain.

Besides that, the support team also cleared doubts about the update to users.

Cardano founder’s reaction

Elated over the development, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson cheered the crypto hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger’s announcement via tweet, saying, “Moving the chains. Great work ledger”

Recently, the leading layer 1 blockchain has increased its mainnet block size by 8K, taking note of the increment in transaction volume, and the future growth potentialities.

According to a Monday announcement by Cardano’s founding company, Input Output Hong Kong [IOHK], the upgrade was proposed last weekend. Implemented on 25th April, it has increased ADA’s block size by 10% to 88KB, where initially it was 80KB.

Further, IOHK noted that the scalability upgrade “is the latest in a series of planned network optimizations” for Cardano in 2022. It will not only increase the network’s throughput but also ramp up the performance of DApps building atop the blockchain.

OpenSea’s new smart contract upgrade goes LIVE

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The world’s most dominant nonfungible token marketplace OpenSea unveiled a new smart contract upgrade in the late hours of 18 February 2022 designed to remove inactive listings on the platform.

As part of the contract upgrade, all OpenSea users will be required to migrate their NFT listings which at present are hosted on the Ethereum [ETH] blockchain to the new smart contract. As stated in the official announcement, the NFT listings created before Feb. 18 are slated to automatically expire within a week by Feb. 25 at 2 pm ET. Reading along similar lines, the blog stated,

“This new upgrade will ensure old, inactive listings on Ethereum securely expire and allow us to offer new safety features in the future.”

After the successful migration, the NFT listing will show the original date of posting. However, once the deadline is over, users still can relist the delisted NFTs over the new smart contract. The FAQ article also mentions that during the migration phase, the platform will not levy gas fees for NFT movement but will nullify the old Ethereum-based smart contract, which would essentially expire the old offers.

Here’s OpenSea’s two-step migration process

The migration of the NFT listing is a two-way step. At first, the user needs to navigate to OpenSea by clicking on the ‘Migrate listings’ option. In the next process, the user will need to click on the ‘Confirm’ button which is present next to each listing.

Then a notification will confirm the migration and users will be able to view the listing with a new expiration date.

OpenSea has been lately on an upgrading spree after a bug allowed attackers to gain illegal access who then exploited old contracts to buy tokens for several thousands of dollars below market price. A few weeks ago, the platform announced a new system that will help users to weed out unclaimed sale offers.

As per the announcement, the new system will enable users to cancel all unfilled contracts while incurring only minimal gas fees. In addition to that, the proposed change would ensure to make signatures clearer, effectively preventing users from mistaking contract terms in the future.

Cardano [ADA] starts on a negative despite gaining smart contract capabilities

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Cardano [ADA] had a sporadic rise in the 2021 summer. After decoupling from Bitcoin [BTC], ADA went on to post an astonishing rally that only a few alts could mimic. But the token’s price action is a classic example of “buy the rumor, sell the news.”

ADA’s strength over the past couple of weeks displayed immense potential, but as the highly-anticipated development of the Alonzo upgrade arrived, the crypto-asset flashed red. As a matter of fact, ADA was down by 6.38% over the past 24-hours which drove its price to $2.42.

What is Cardano’s Alonzo upgrade?

Infrastructure-wise Cardano’s wait for smart contract capabilities is over. The arrival of Alonzo essentially means that the network is now ready to host smart contracts, thereby facilitating different teams and projects to begin creating and deploying their protocols directly on the public blockchain for the very first time.

The official blog post by IOHK announcing the upgrade stated,

“It’s only just the beginning. But this is still a moment for celebration. As a community, we have been on an incredible journey together. Rightly, we should allow ourselves to acknowledge the tremendous efforts made by so many to get here. This will also be a time for reflection on the challenges we’ve collectively overcome.”

According to IOHK, the Byron reboot in March 2020 set the stage for the Cardano network by implementing a robust and scalable code base on which to build. The following Shelley upgrade transformed the network from a federated model towards a decentralized one. This year’s Mary upgrade helped create a multi-asset network and introduced native tokens.

Cardano’s latest Alonzo upgrade was deployed with the help of hard fork combinator [HFC] technology, which combines two protocols into a single protocol. This isn’t the first time, that Cardano has leveraged this tool. In fact, HFC was used in previous upgrades as well.

The development arm of Cardano also revealed having the “backbone for a new decentralized application platform” by enabling Plutus scripts to be written and executed on-chain that would pave the way for numerous decentralized applications [DApp] and decentralized finance [DeFi] use cases.

It’s still early

Cardano has never been able to escape FUD and has drawn severe criticism from Ethereum developers. TWJ had earlier reported the backlash Cardano received over the Minswap drama. Pointing towards the inevitability of poor development teams behind decentralized platforms, poor coding practice, and the presence of bad actors, IOHK stated,

“Let us be clear. There will be bumps in the road. Early user experiences might not be perfect. Some early DApps will have issues. We’ll see some great development teams and some poor ones. This is a permissionless, decentralized blockchain, so this is inevitable.”

Cardano’s Alonzo Blue sees first-ever smart contract deployment

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Cardano has made notable strides in the last few months. In the latest development, IOHK’s Marketing Director Tim Harrison, Head of Delivery Nigel Hemsley, and Delivery Lead Dimitris Poulopoulos revealed that Alonzo is now able to run smart contracts.

The IOHK execs, in a recent conversation, revealed that the smart contract is powered by a Cardano-programmed language called Plutus. The team also disclosed the implementation of a command-line interface [CLI] for writing “Hello World”-style smart contracts as part of the first phase which is also known as the Alonzo Blue phase. This entails only a limited set of staking pool operators and early Cardano [ADA] enthusiasts or pioneers.

Hamsley stated,

“Well, we got the [Alonzo] Blue network up. It is up and spinning.”

The project in question has teamed up with external teams, such as Altlabs, Eleks, Mlabs, Obsidian, among others in a bid to expand applications and support experiments from decentralized finance [DeFi] realm like decentralized data oracles, DEXs, liquidity, and staking pools, lending and borrowing instrument, all the way to crypto-backed stablecoins, and non-fungible tokens [NFTs].

Poulopoulos also said,

“It could be as simple as a transaction that passes back a ‘Hello, world,’ or a confirmation of a payment that has been made.[…] It means that we have Alonzo running smart contracts.”

Cardano’s Alonzo Roadmap

The team also expects that the next phase, Alonzo White, to commence in July this year. However, for that to happen, the Cardano ecosystem needs to make sure that the partners and pioneers have been able to do their “Hello, world’ scripts.” This phase could potentially incorporate 500 community members, pioneers, stake pool operators [SPO].

The final phase is Alonzo purple, which is a crucial phase is where the testnet will be made wholly public with all Pioneers integrated with the partners’ decentralized applications. The roll-out of the Alonzo roadmap is scheduled to be fully implemented by the end of the fourth quarter of 2021.