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August was rife with talk of censorship following the OFAC sanctioning of Tornado Cash. Popular applications and a large mining pool were found to be censoring their user interfaces, raising concern that validators would also censor transactions following the upcoming Merge.

Prominent community members rose up to loudly declare their rejection of censorship and committed to supporting a censor-free Ethereum. This interview captures that spirit and walks us through the mechanisms used by Ethereum to combat censorship post-Merge.

On Etherscan's side, we've spent most of the last month heads down preparing for the Merge. We also added a new security feature to help users avoid getting phished.

The theme of this issue is inevitably the Merge. Our analysis article goes through metrics related to it and the quiz reviews your knowledge about it. Answer for a chance to win $10 in ETH!

Recap of Metrics on the Eve of the Merge

Heading into the Merge, we looked at metrics related to the Beacon chain including:

• Deposit amount
• Validator distribution
• Node distribution
• Client distribution

FEATURE

Transaction Warning

Transactions involving poor reputation tokens are flagged by default for user safety.

FEATURE

Other Base Currencies

Did you know? You can use non-USD currencies as a default on Etherscan!

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The Case for Social Slashing

Eric Wall makes a case for social slashing and User Activated Soft Forks as a defence mechanism against censorship, with learnings from Bitcoin.

ercwl.medium.com

A Thread Summarizing the latest Maker Drama (TM)

How Maker governance went from onboarding a U.S. Commercial Bank to discussing a depeg from the US dollar in two months.

twitter.com/g_dip

Open Sourcing the Flashbots Relay

Following concerns raised about censorship by their MEV relay, Flashbots promptly open-sourced their relay code for others to examine and build on.

writings.flashbots.net

Proof of Stake: a Compilation of Writings by Vitalik

The physical and digital book compiling various writings by Vitalik over the last 10 years is out in September. Get a signed digital copy and NFT here.

twitter.com/VitalikButerin

Defending Privacy in Crypto

Putting action behind their words, Coinbase funds a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions of the Tornado Cash smart contracts.

blog.coinbase.com

Data Availability Sampling: From Basics to Open Problems

Blog post by Paradigm explaining the basics of data availability sampling (DAS) and the open problems that are waiting for a researcher to solve.

paradigm.xyz

SSPC: Stupid Simple Payment Channels

A Payment Channel library by Marius from the Geth team that aims to be as easy to include into existing implementations as possible.

github.com/MariusVanDerWijden

The Can't Be Evil NFT Licenses

a16z Crypto released a set of free, public "Can't Be Evil" licenses, designed specifically for NFTs and inspired by the work of Creative Commons.

a16zcrypto.com

Long List of Crypto (LLC)

LLC aims to be the 'Yellow Pages' of Web3 and catalogues a list of projects, especially early stage ones. It has so far captured 1,500+ projects.

twitter.com/brazenburrit0

Transaction: Failed Attack on Aurora's Rainbow Bridge

While hacks that steal millions of dollars are often the ones highlighted, this time it's a win for the targeted team, earned by their security measures.

Address: Depositor of 500 Offline Beacon Chain Validators

This address is staking an eye-watering 16,000 ETH but has been offline since 6 September. If you know the owner, remind them to fix their nodes!

Questions received last month:

Why is my L2 withdrawal not done after waiting more than 7 days?
Withdrawals from Optimistic Rollup chains such as Arbitrum and Optimism require a second transaction on L1 after the fraud proof window has ended. Without triggering this transaction, the withdrawal will not be completed.

Why does the transaction warning flag tokens that are not poor rep?
The new transaction warning feature includes a 'gentle' reminder for transactions involving tokens without updated info such as a website link, as some of these may be scams that are yet to be flagged. Read more here.

Confused with some terms in this newsletter?
Remember to check the Etherscan glossary!

Looking for a job in crypto? Check out these roles below:

Unity Game Developer at Branch | Seattle/Remote

Director of DEFI Strategy at Telos Network | Remote

Social Media Manager at Boson Protocol | Remote

Head of Marketing at Boson Protocol | Remote

POLL

Quiz: The Merge

Test your knowledge of the Merge with this quiz and stand to win $10 in ETH!