Distributed Digest: Thursday, February 14, 2019

February 14, 2019 7:21 PM

Your daily distillation of crypto news for Thursday, February 14, 2019:

Getting Down with CREATE2

With a security vulnerability found in Constantinople’s CREATE2 opcode, one that would enable attackers to exploit “self-destructed” contracts by deploying different code to the same address, Ethereum community members have taken to social media to unpack the situation.

Counterfactual’s Jeff Coleman recently posted a Twitter PSA encouraging users to switch to CREATE2 with the implementation of Constantinople, as the new opcode helps to decrease the difficulty of verifying a contract’s identity. Coleman also posted on reddit, noting that Ethereum developers should not need to worry about the purported issues with CREATE2.

To be safe, one community member decided to write a contract to combat the CREATE2 attack vector; however, this individual advises that the code has not been audited and should be used at everyone’s own risk.

Fear the ETH Difficulty Bomb

With the difficulty bomb looming overhead, average block times have steadily increased over the past few months, reaching 20.48 seconds yesterday, according to data from Etherscan. The increase in block times is paired with a steady decrease in block rewards, falling to a little over 13,000 ETH yesterday, also according to Etherscan.

Block times should return to normal with the implementation of Constantinople, which delays the Ethereum ice age. However, the upgrade will also reduce the block reward from 3 to 2 ETH per block, so daily issuance rates will not rebound.

Uniswap Most Active Exchange for MKR Trading

Automated token exchange Uniswap has risen to number one for Maker trading volume. For the MKR-ETH pair, there is a reported 24-hour volume of around $400,000, according to data from CoinGecko.

The team at Uniswap tweeted today about the exchange’s success, noting that after 100 days of launching, “it had locked up 1250 MKR (0.125% of total supply) and 200,000 DAI (0.25% of total supply).” With such an increase in MKR trading volume, Uniswap (jokingly) believes it is “set for world domination.”

Dani is a full-time writer for ETHNews. He received his bachelor’s degree in English writing from the University of Nevada, Reno, where he also studied journalism and queer theory. In his free time, he writes poetry, plays the piano, and fangirls over fictional characters. He lives with his partner, three dogs, and two cats in the middle of nowhere, Nevada.

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