Staking Withdrawals Activate On Zhejiang Testnet

Quick Take

• Shapella activates on the Zhejiang testnet.
• CoW Swap solver suffers a ~$166k exploit.
• Lido proposes its V2 upgrade.
• Offchain Labs unviels Stylus.

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Shanghai Activates On Zhejiang Testnet

Ethereum core developers have successfully activated the Shanghai and Capella upgrades on the Zhejiang testnet. Coined as Shapella, Shanghai and Capella are upgrades to Ethereum’s execution and consensus layers that will enable staking withdrawals for validators. Zhejiang marks the first of three testnets to undergo the Shapella upgrade.

The upgrade on the Zhejiang testnet successfully processed full and partial withdrawals as well as BLS changes. Validators with BLS-based 0x00 withdrawal credentials will be able to change their credentials to 0x01 for proper staking withdrawals. Developers now plan to execute the upgrade on the Sepolia and Goerli testnets.

CoW Swap Solver Exploited

CoW Swap, an MEV-protected DEX aggregator, suffered an exploit that resulted in $166k worth of assets being drained from its settlement contract. The exploit was caused by a vulnerability in a smart contract that was deployed and pre-approved by a solver on the exchange. User funds are not affected by the exploit.

The solver later reimbursed the CoW Swap settlement contract, resulting in zero losses for CoW Protocol. Solvers are external participants that compete to find the best execution price for traders and are required to post 500,000 cUSDC and 1.5 million COW tokens as collateral, which can be slashed for malicious actions.

The solver had pre-approved unlimited DAI spending on a contract that contained a vulnerability that allowed arbitrary call execution. CoW Swap allows solvers to use funds from its settlement contract to replace certain AMM interactions. The solver’s losses were limited since assets from the settlement contract are withdrawn each week.

Lido V2 Proposed Upgrade

Lido Finance presented a proposal for Lido V2, an upgrade that includes support for staking withdrawals and introduces a Staking Router. The withdrawals mechanism will feature Turbo and Bunker operating modes to address mass-slashing events. The Staking Router is a controller contract that provides a modular architecture.

The new design allows sets of validator pools to act as modules and supports solo stakers, DAOs, and DVT clusters as node operators. Lido plans to deploy a testnet in early March. It will also be facilitating a withdrawal credentials rotation ceremony for migrating validators with BLS-based 0x00 withdrawal credentials.

Offchain Labs Unviels Stylus

Offchain Labs unveiled Stylus, an upgrade to its general-purpose programming environment that features WASM smart contracts. WebAssembly, or WASM, allows developers to write applications in high-level languages such as C, C++, and Rust. Stylus support will be available on both Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova.

Offchain Labs coins the expansion as EVM+ since the new features are entirely additive to the EVM. According to Offchain Labs, Arbitrum dapps written in Stylus are up to 10x faster than dapps written in Solidity. Developers will also be able to create their own precompiles in Stylus. The upgrade is set to go live sometime this year.

Argent Unviels StarkNet Web Wallet

Smart contract wallet provider Argent unveiled a new web wallet for StarkNet. Once released, StarkNet users will be able to create an Argent wallet using only an email address. The wallet features a password and email login in which a user’s password is used to encrypt private keys. Since the wallet is browser-based, it does not require an app or extension download. Argent did not specify a release date for the wallet.