Blockchain Developer Monthly Newsletter ⛓

The 9th Edition of Blockchain Developer Monthly!

Blockchain Developers' #1 source to keep up-to-date with what's happening within the web3 industry, without wasting your valuable time. Each month I recap the most important articles, guides, news, resources, podcasts and videos from the past month.

March 2023 was a fun month, let's check out what you might have missed!

Is this your first time here? If so, keep reading.

Been here before? I like you. Welcome back. Skip right to the March 2023 updates in the next section.

Ok... for your first timers, I'm Markus.

You're thinking... What's this all about?!

Well there are lots of blockchain newsletters and youtube channels out there that will hype you up on the latest NFT project or predicting some new token that's going to the moon.

Much less so in recent months given most of the "tourists" looking to make a quick buck tend to disappear when prices go down. But the builders are still here and so are you and so is this newsletter.

It's still hard though to find newsletters that actually go deep into things that are relevant for developers working in the space.

That's why I created this - a newsletter dedicated to developers who want to stay up-to-date and excel in the world of web3.

In case you aren't already convinced... Being a solidity, blockchain, & ethereum developer is a fantastic career option.

Regardless of whether you love or hate crypto, there's no denying blockchain is an exciting technology with tons of job opportunities. You can work around the world, you get to work on solutions to big problems, and you're on the cutting edge of the tech sector.

But things move FAST.

So staying up-to-date with the constantly evolving ecosystem can be tough. If you're still reading this, maybe you want to be a top-performing developer within the web3 landscape, but probably don’t have time to find, read, and synthesize all the articles, videos and podcasts that come out each month.

So this monthly Blockchain Developer Newsletter was born.

I keep you up-to-date with what's happening within the web3 industry, without wasting your valuable time, by curating the most important articles, guides, news, resources, podcasts and videos from the past month.

This newsletter was inspired by Andrei's Web Developer Monthly + Python Monthly and Daniel's Machine Learning Monthly.

Ok, let's dive into this issue. I hope you enjoy!

Let's dive in. Here's what you missed in March 2023 as a Blockchain Developer…

Solidity Developer Survey Results

The results of a recent Solidity Developer Survey were published.

But I know you're a busy bee, so I've reviewed the results for you and pulled out the most interesting tidbits:

• Most users are in the US, India and France
• More than half of users contributed to open-source repositories
• 60% said they feel they were able to be productive in Solidity in less than half a year of learning
• 82% use Visual Studio Code as their editor
• Solidity developers are using mostly Hardhat (95%), Remix (53%) and Foundry (38%)
• Besides the Ethereum network, the most used EVM networks are Polygon, BSC, Arbitrum, Avalanche and Optimism
• Most problems using Solidity are related to: (i) Stack Too Deep, which is an error caused by the limitation in how variables can be referenced in the EVM stack, (ii) Bytecode Size Limit, which is an issue related to the maximum allowable size of a smart contract, and (iii) general debugging issues
• Most developers don’t use fixed-point types yet, but if you've taken my Solidity course you know this is what the Solidity ecosystem is moving towards and that's why it's taught in the course!

Ethereum Event Updates

Devcon is Ethereum's premier event and the next one, Devcon 7, was just announced. But I have some bad news... it won’t be happening this year.

Instead it'll be happening during the second half of 2024, somewhere in SouthEast Asia. You can still propose or comment on suggested locations here.

Why no Devcon until 2024? The reasoning given was so that the event can have greater significance, and because there are more Ethereum events going on than ever before.

But there is also good news: they dropped a hint about another Devconnect event to be held in 2023.

Also the ETHGlobal hackathon in Istanbul was postponed to the end of the year, likely November. Instead there is now an additional ETHGlobal event in Lisbon in May.

Bank Failures and USDC De-peg

Several big banks failed this month... now that's a scary sentence!

These failures include the second and third-largest bank failures in US history: Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank, which together had an accumulated asset value of $319 billion dollars.

"Not your keys, not your coins" is a well known phrase in crypto, referring to the need to own the private keys associated with your wallet in order to actually control the crypto within it.

Well these failures highlight a similar issue with the conventional banking system: when you deposit your money with the bank, it's no longer yours.

Instead, the bank goes off and lends your money out, and simply owes you a debt. And if they're unable to repay that debt to you, well... you can see why this would create fear.

So "not your keys, not your coins" holds true even for banks too, not just crypto.

The difference with the banks is Federal Governments around the world jumped in to "save the day" (at least for now)... you can be assured they aren't doing that with crypto companies.

These failures also had some downstream effects for crypto: USDC issuer Circle had $3.3 billion in cash deposited with SVB, which led to fear and people selling off USDC.

At the lowest point, USDC de-pegged to a price of $0.85. Circle had to step in explaining that any missing funds will be covered by them which quickly led to USDC coming back to its peg of $1.

Do Kwon Arrested in Montenegro

Do Kown, founder of LUNA, has been on the run from authorities since the collapse of LUNA and UST. But he has now been arrested in Montenegro.

He was wanted by Interpol and was traveling from Costa Rica on a private jet with false passports from Costa Rica (though Do Kwon denied the claims that the documents were falsified). Sounds pretty lavish, huh?

It’s unclear if he will be extradited to South Korea or the United States. Stay tuned!

The Loot Bag of Info and Tips 💰!

• Arbitrum, the most popular Layer-2 chain for Ethereum, had an airdrop.
• Sourcify v2 was released. A new library @ethereum-sourcify/lib-sourcify is now used to verify contracts on Sourcify.
• Foundry’s forge-std v1.5.0 was released, most notably with a feature for doing styled console.logs (colors/bold/italic) and features for minting ERC721 and ERC1155 tokens in tests.

See you next month!

That's the key stuff you needed to know as a Blockchain Developer in March 2023. Give yourself a pat on the back, you're all caught up.

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Blockchain Developer Monthly and I hope you have a great March 🙌

See you next month,
Markus

P.S. Did I miss something? Have something I should include in a future post? Let me know.

By the way, I teach people how to code in Solidity and get hired as a Blockchain Developer in the most efficient way possible. Come check out a few of our Blockchain & Web3 Courses below and try out some of the free preview lessons.