ChainCatcher news, according to Evan Van Ness, the Week in Ethereum (WiE) has officially ended on January 1, 2025. Van Ness stated that WiE failed to find a sustainable business model due to the Ethereum Foundation (EF) ceasing its symbolic support. He pointed out that the EF's current perception of WiE's value has diminished, and there is also a lower emphasis on contributions from non-developers or researchers within the community. Furthermore, he emphasized that although there was an opportunity to continue operations through fundraising, he preferred to focus on meaningful new projects and admitted that, as the founder, he had not succeeded in turning WiE into a successful commercial product.

ChainCatcher news, the founder of Week in Ethereum News (WiE), Evan Van Ness, stated on social media: "Due to a conversation with the leadership of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) earlier this year, I announce that this newsletter will cease operations, as the communication indicated they believe continuing the Week in Ethereum News is not valuable.For the remainder of 2024, WiE has received very little funding support from the Ethereum Foundation. Although this support was mostly symbolic, the EF leadership's choice to cut this trivial support clearly indicates that WiE will end immediately.The Ethereum Foundation withdrawing support has made it more clear than anything else that it is time for WiE to conclude.The Week in Ethereum News once had a good track record. Over the years, at conferences, many developers have told me that WiE has impacted their Solidity or security careers. They often mentioned that this newsletter influenced their decision to purchase ETH. Once upon a time, this established newsletter was the upstream source for most Ethereum news supporters.But unfortunately, WiE failed to find a sustainable business model. Advertising and sponsorships are hard to sell because the marketing director does not value developers. I have high standards for content, but completing it in a profitable way has proven to be too time-consuming."

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum Foundation member Devansh Mehta announced that the AI-based project donation amount prediction competition has officially started. Participants are required to predict the relative funding ratios among 1023 groups of projects based on the provided 2387 training comparison data. This competition serves as a warm-up for the official contest at the end of January, which will involve 4303 Ethereum repositories and their dependent projects.Devansh Mehta stated that Vitalik will fund this event with $20,000, and the contributions of participants may influence the funding methods for future open-source projects, gaining recognition from the community and Ethereum developers.

ChainCatcher news, according to Lookonchain monitoring, after the Ethereum Foundation sold 100 ETH on December 17, the ETH price has dropped by about 17%. In the past year, the Ethereum Foundation has conducted a total of 32 ETH sale transactions, selling a total of 4,466 ETH (approximately 12.6 million USD), with 15 transactions close to the market peak.

ChainCatcher news, according to Lookonchain monitoring, the Ethereum Foundation has sold another 100 ETH (approximately $402,400) today. Since January 1, 2024, the Ethereum Foundation has sold a total of 4,466 ETH this year, amounting to about $12.62 million.

ChainCatcher news, according to on-chain analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, 5 minutes ago, the Ethereum Foundation's address 0xd77, used for small high-frequency sales of ETH, sold 100 ETH at a price of $4,024, receiving 402,400 DAI.

ChainCatcher message, according to Ember monitoring, 5 minutes ago, the Ethereum Foundation's address 0xd77...1f4 used for small high-frequency sales of ETH sold 100 ETH at a price of $3,743, and exchanged it for 374,300 DAI.The last time the Ethereum Foundation sold ETH was 27 days ago.

ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake stated that Solana's golden age is coming to an end and will not pose a threat to Ethereum. Despite Solana's strong development momentum, Drake emphasized that Ethereum focuses on long-term gains.He said, "Solana is currently at its peak, but I believe this will mark the end of Solana's golden age, as all of Solana's competitive advantages in latency and throughput will disappear due to fundamental architectural differences that make it non-scalable." Currently, Ethereum developers are heavily relying on Layer 2 to provide faster and cheaper transactions.Drake stated, "I believe Layer 1 is competing with Bitcoin, while Layer 2 is competing with Solana. Therefore, competing with Solana is not even within the scope of Layer 1's responsibilities; we should compete on security and health. So if Solana has any competition, it needs to come from applications and Layer 2."

ChainCatcher message, the Ethereum Foundation released the update report for the funding projects in the third quarter of 2024. The report shows that the total funding amount for the third quarter reached $12.8488 million, covering various fields including community education, consensus layer, cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs, developer experience and tools, execution layer, Layer 2, and more. Among them, community education projects accounted for the largest share, including the EEA Industry Day conference held in Bangkok, Thailand, the ETH Pura Vida conference and hackathon held in San Jose, Costa Rica, and other events.In the technical field, the foundation continues to support the development of consensus layer clients such as Lighthouse, Nimbus, and Grandine, as well as the upgrade and maintenance of development tools like Web3.js and OpenZeppelin account abstraction contracts. Additionally, the report also indicates that the foundation provided funding for several research projects related to zero-knowledge proofs.

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake posted on X that today marks the four-year anniversary of the Ethereum Beacon Chain's launch. In its initial phase, only 500,000 ETH were staked. Although it did not provide direct benefits to users at the beginning, it has gradually grown into one of the most powerful foundations in blockchain history.Looking ahead, Drake believes Ethereum has the opportunity to become the settlement layer of the value internet. Although the Beacon Chain is still not perfect, the upgrade path in the coming years will remain challenging, including improvements in censorship resistance and MEV handling, reducing staking deposits, increasing finality speed, smart issuance, achieving smartwatch-level full-chain verification, and post-quantum security. Additionally, outside the consensus layer, there is hope to achieve complete sharding in the data layer and native Rollup in the execution layer.Drake stated that many L1 improvements will be gradually released in the coming years, and enhancements like post-quantum security may require a complete redesign. L2 solutions will provide significant performance improvements within months, including fast user experiences, low fees, unlimited throughput, and synchronous composability.

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake published a paper revealing details related to the BeamSNARKs algorithm. BeamSNARKs is an enhanced ZK algorithm that allows provers to demonstrate the truth of a statement to verifiers without revealing underlying data and without requiring interaction.For Ethereum, the BeamSNARKs developed by Moonchain represents a transformative advancement in two key areas: privacy and scalability. In terms of privacy, BeamSNARKs enable the verification of transactions or computations without exposing sensitive data, thereby supporting use cases such as confidential transactions and private smart contracts.It is reported that Beam Chain is an indispensable consensus layer improvement for the Ethereum 3.0 era. This is a proposal to redesign Ethereum announced by Justin Drake at DevCon. Ethereum is expected to take several years to transition completely from the PoS era to the ZK era, at which point Ethereum itself will be fully equipped with ZK capabilities.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake tweeted that the Ethereum Foundation is investing tens of millions of dollars in zkVM, including zkRISC-V formal verification, Poseidon cryptanalysis, and L2beat for zkVMs.

ChainCatcher message, encrypted KOL Mark summarized the project information updated by ai16z founder Shaw on his social platform. This includes:Plans to launch the ai16z dao autonomous trading feature next week, and promises not to tweet until everything is completed;A leading CEX wishes to list ai16z, but requires ai16z to establish a legal entity first;Currently in talks with the actual A16Z to discuss the launch of DUNA (Decentralized Non-Corporate Non-Profit Organization: Legal DAO formation in Wyoming);Engaging in discussions with companies like the Ethereum Foundation, Magic Eden, and Jupiter for potential collaborations;The Ai16z Open Committee will be jointly established with Nous Research (a top open-source AI company) and Loot Realms.

ChainCatcher news, according to official information, the Ethereum Foundation has announced the launch of its first official summer internship program, including research internships and software engineering internships, aimed at cultivating the next generation of Ethereum developers and researchers. Participants will directly contribute to core projects in key areas such as protocol security, account abstraction, scalability research, and client development.It is reported that selected interns will be assigned a short-term project and a mentor and are expected to work independently to some extent. Applications are currently open, with a deadline of December 9, 2024. After preliminary screening, formal interviews will be conducted, and the selection notification process is expected to be completed by January 10, 2025.

ChainCatcher news, according to on-chain analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, an address that obtained 200,000 ETH from the Ethereum genesis block in 2015 and received 42,600 ETH from an Ethereum Foundation associated address in 2016 transferred 5,707.9 ETH ($18.08 million) to Kraken 50 minutes ago.Since acquiring these 242,600 ETH, this address has periodically transferred some ETH to Kraken. Over the course of 8 years, a total of 221,000 ETH has been transferred to Kraken, cashing out an amount of $265.8 million, with an average selling price of $1,200. Currently, it still holds 21,000 ETH ($66.64 million).