DeFi Dev News 4/15-4/21: Worldcoin Announces L2 World Chain, Cyfrin Audits Open-Sources Smart Contract Static Analyzer, Arbitrum Foundation Grants Phase 3 Offers up to 150k

Grants & Accelerators

• Mantra, a RWA Layer 1 blockchain, launches a $11M Incubator Program at the Dubai World Trade Centre. Developers for Lending, CDP, Real Estate and GMX perps, and Yield splitting protocols are encouraged to apply.
• Arbitrum Foundation Grant Program Phase 3 is now open to apply, providing funds between $20k & $150k to projects built on Arbitrum mainnet, Arbitrum testnet, mainnet of any chain, Orbit or Stylus.
• Privacy Scaling Exploration Program is now open to apply, aimed at accelerating talents in the fields of ZKP, FHE, MPC, and related technologies.
• TON launches The Open League DeFi Grants Program with grants up to 520,000 USD per team.

Hackathons & Events 🧑‍💻

• Radiants DAO announces Bonkathon, a 6-week Hackathon focused on expanding the Bonk ecosystem with $350,000 in total prizes.

Research 🧑‍🔬

• billypham09 published a research paper on building a ZKP bridge for Ethereum full nodes, with open-source code.
• Matter Labs shares a research paper on the mechanism design for prover fee markets on ZK-rollups, written in conjunction with Yale, Hebrew University and Imperial College.

Tooling 🛠

Ethereum

• jtriley.eth introduces token-types, a drop-in replacement for interfaces without the memory allocation or bloat.
• zefram.eth launched BidDog, an open-source implementation of am-AMM (Auction-Managed Automated Market Maker).
• ethPandasOps introduces Assertoor, an Ethereum testnet testing tool aimed at simplifying everything from routine checks to more intricate processes such as the handling of deposits, exits, and similar transactions.
• Cyfrin Audits announces Aderyn, an open-source Rust-based Smart Contract static analyzer designed to help protocol engineers and security researchers find vulnerabilities in Solidity codebases.

L2s

• 0xcygaar launches open-source package “inkmate”. Developers can deploy Rust contracts on Arbitrum Orbit chains that support Stylus.

Solana

• Anchor v.0.30.0 is out featuring improvements with bug fixes and additions including cli, lang, idl.

Education/Mechanism 🧑‍🏫

• terence.eth introduces the background and benefits of ePBS bypassing relayer.
• Jason Chaskin shares the future of MEV and public mempool.
• 0xcygaar shares a beginner’s guide to Runes, the new protocol that will bring fungible tokens to Bitcoin at the halving.
• Charles Wang shares Solidity tips in "Why Strict Pragma is Preferred over Floating".

Infrastructure 🏗

Ethereum

• Paradigm announces they will open source Reth AlphaNet, an OP Stack-compatible testnet rollup aimed at maximizing Reth performance.
• Lido deploys Simple DVT Module on the mainnet, aimed at offering solo and community stakers the opportunity to participate in running validators using the Lido protocol.
• Geth v.1.13.15 is out featuring some fixes mainly to avoid data-corruption.
• Uniswap Foundation announces Uniswap v4-core (PoolManager) is entering a code-freeze mode soon and Uniswap v4 is planning to be deployed later this year.

L2s

• Scroll announces Bernoulli Upgrade is set to take place on April 29, 2024. This upgrade will introduce EIP-4844 for L1 data availability and support for precompiled SHA2-256.
• Offchain Labs releases Arbitrum BOLD (Bounded Liquidity Delay) on testnet, aimed at enabling permissionless validation on Arbitrum chains.
• Worldcoin announces World Chain, a Layer 2 blockchain based on OP stack emphasizing "proof of personhood”.
• Conduit announces ParallelFi is the first Arbitrum Orbit L2 upgraded to post blobs to Ethereum, powered by Conduit.

Security 👾

• ZachXBT shares an investigation into the alleged $11.1M Prisma exploiter 0x77, as well as other exploits they are connected to.
• Security Alliance introduces the latest initiative “SEAL-ISAC”, a new threat intelligence sharing platform integrated with SEAL 911.
• Neptune Mutual launches the analysis report on the $44.7M Hedgey Finance Exploit.

Bug Bounties 🐞

• TITLES, an ecosystem of creative tools powered by artist-owned AI models, launches an audit contest on Sherlock with total rewards of 24,500 USDC.
• Arcadia, a DeFi yield aggregator, launches an audit contest on Sherlock with total rewards of 14,500 USDC.

Product Launches 🚀

• Flat Money, a protocol built by the dHedge team, is live on Base L2. Flat Money LPs can deposit Rocket Pool $rETH to mint $UNIT, a yield-bearing flatcoin that earns trading fees, funding rate fees, and liquidation fees from the Perpetual Futures Market. Leverage Traders can open long positions on $rETH in the Perpetual Futures Market and earn $FMP rewards based on $rETH trade volume.
• OKX launched the public mainnet of X Layer, its zkEVM L2. Built with Polygon CDK, X Layer provides faster, cheaper transactions when interacting with dApps.
• Origami Finance, an automated leverage protocol, is live on Ethereum. Origami’s first Ethena vaults are powered by Morpho Blue, allowing users to farm with 5x leverage on both sUSDe & USDe and earn bonus Sats.

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