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Ethereum mainnet archive node service ArchiveNode.io says it will be shutting down, claiming that the project has been a success.

On April 4, ArchiveNode.io announced it was sunsetting its services after more than three years of providing free Ethereum mainnet archive node services to developers, students and researchers.

An Ethereum Archive Node is an instance of an Ethereum client configured to build an archive of all historical states. This type of node is a useful tool for querying historical blockchain data that is not accessible on full nodes.

Additionally, Archive Nodes are not required to participate in block validation so they can theoretically be built from scratch; however, they do require much greater storage capacity.

The announcement was made by DeFi Dude, who initiated the project and claimed it was being shut down because we succeeded," adding:

He added that nobody was running Archive Nodes when the project started. The only option was to pay Ethereum infrastructure provider Infura $250 monthly to access archive data.

The goal of the project was to get archive data into the hands of developers, students, and researchers who wanted to build cool shit, but didnt have the time, money, or resources available to run their own archive node.

He confirmed the project was never to make money or profit.

Related:SEC lawsuit claims jurisdiction because ETH nodes are clustered in the US

He added there is currently a robust remote procedure call (RPC) provider market offering access to archive data making the project obsolete.

ArchiveNode.io thanked the Ethereum Foundation for their initial grant of $10,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits to get the project off the ground.

According to a Cointelegraph report from August, just three centralized cloud providers account for more than two-thirds of Ethereum nodes. More than half of the total nodes were hosted on AWS, according to data at the time.

Features: Account abstraction supercharges Ethereum wallets: Dummies guide

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Ethereum Archive Node service shuts down, saying it succeeded - Cointelegraph

A new decentralized layer has been added on top of Ethereum to make smart accounts possible with the introduction of ERC-4337 and account abstraction but infrastructure providers suggest it may be tricky to participate profitably right now.

ERC-4337, commonly called smart accounts or account abstraction, was deployed on the Ethereum mainnet on March 1. Smart accounts are essentially a supercharged version of an Ethereum wallet. Although smart contract wallets already exist, they rely on centralized components. ERC-4337 changes that with a distributed network of Bundlers and Paymasters.

Under the hood, there are a few subtle but significant changes namely the addition of the User Intent Layer, explained Matt Cutler, the co-founder and CEO of Blocknative, a core Ethereum infrastructureprovider.

According to Cutler, an Ethereum transaction today involves several discrete steps.

A user accesses their standard externally-owned account (EOA) or private key to compose a signed transaction for example, transferring a nonfungible token (NFT) to another user.

This transaction is then sent to the public mempool which could be described as a shared queue for transactions to be plucked out by a Builder who organizes it into a profitable block. From there, the block is proposed to a Validator, who ultimately proposes and publishes it on-chain, completing the transaction.

Under ERC-4337, the new User Intent Layer is introduced before the current EOA step.

This additional layer allows a user to initiate more complex transactions in a single step. To make this possible, ERC-4337 introduces an Alternative Mempool and a network of transaction Bundlers, and along with it a new way to earn fees.

A Bundler is a node that does a very similar job to the block Builder. Instead of organizing signed transactions from the public mempool to assemble a profitable block, a Bundler grabs User Operations, or userOps, from the Alt-Mempool to create the most profitable bundle which is signed and submitted to the network as a single transaction. This is all part of the newly added layer that makes smart accounts possible.

Bundlers get compensated via userOp gas fees for providing their much-needed service.

While anyone can be a Bundler in theory, in reality, being a successful one might be another story, Cutler warned.

Like Builders, Bundlers are specialized actors made up of relatively sophisticated development teams operating substantial computational, storage, and networking infrastructure, he said.

ERC-4337 is trustless and permissionless. So if youre technically adept, by all means, you can stand up and operate your own Bundler. The challenge is Bundling is a competitive market. So you will be competing against relatively sophisticated teams that are investing heavily into being a competitive Bundler, he said.

Bundlers are not the sort of tooling that you just stand up, forget about and it starts printing you money. We expect Bundling to be substantially more technically sophisticated than being a validator, for instance.

Cutler noted there are already a number of open-source bundler code repositories.

Related: Ethereum ERC-4337 'smart accounts' launch at WalletCon: Account abstraction is here

There is an ongoing debate about whether ERC-4337 will have an impact on Ethereum gas fees, particularly given the increase in transaction complexity associated with the introduction of the new User Intent layer.

While it is still too early to tell, my current expectation is that, on average, gas fees will not change all that much. If ERC-4337 has an impact, its going to be pretty slight either up or down. We do not expect transaction fees to suddenly go to zero or suddenly become 100x more expensive, said Cutler.

Magazine: Accountabstraction supercharges Ethereum wallets: Dummies guide

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Ethereum ERC-4337 bundlers How hard is joining the network? - Cointelegraph

PancakeSwap, a decentralized exchange, or DEX, with more than 1.5 million unique users, introduced Version 3 on the Ethereum and BNB Chain networks on Monday.

The upgraded platform will offer the cheapest fees for on-chain trades among counterparts such as SushiSwap and Uniswap and increased returns for liquidity providers, the exchange's developers told CoinDesk on Sunday.

PancakeSwap V3 also introduces features that enhance the platform's capital efficiency. These include allowing liquidity providers to concentrate their capital on smaller price ranges, a feature that results in higher fee earnings from the same amount of deposits, the developers said.

V3 will introduce four different trading fee tiers: 0.01%, 0.05%, 0.25% and 1%. V2 offered a single tier of 0.25%. Each token pair can have a liquidity pool for each fee tier, with asset pairs gravitating toward the tier where incentives for both liquidity providers and traders are most rewarding.

This approach is designed to ensure a balance between traders paying the lowest fee tier while still incentivizing the highest possible liquidity from LPs.

In the future, PancakeSwap V3 will introduce two new features: A V3 VIP trading rewards program and a position manager feature.

The VIP program is a tiered system that rewards traders for their trading volume with exclusive benefits such as a chance to get up to a 5% trading fee rebate which may incentivize more platform activity and improve PancakeSwaps revenue.

The "position panager" feature will allow traders to easily deposit liquidity and optimize that position, based on fees and rewards, over time. The tool eliminates the need for manual calculations for third-party integrations, allowing users to automatically adjust their positions and earn fee rewards while staying within range.

Both these features are in development now and are expected to be introduced soon.

PancakeSwap V3 is also compatible with all tools built for the version 3 of Uniswap, which is the largest DEX by daily users and trading volume. PancakeSwap had over $2.5 billion in total value locked as of Monday. Uniswap had $3.9 billion, DefiLlama data shows.

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PancakeSwap DEX Launches Version 3 on BNB Chain and Ethereum - CoinDesk

Godfrey Benjamin

zkSync has recorded close to 300,000 transactions with more than 59,000 ETH bridged

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There is a growing clamor for the scalability of transactions on Ethereum, and one of the protocols with the right technology to do this, zkSync, is breaking impressive milestones. According to new data from crypto market analytics platform Dune Analytics, the newly launched zkSync mainnet Era is garnering immense and intense traction among users.

According to data from Dune, the zkSync Era now has a total of 59,200 ETH tokens that have been bridged, while more than 254,500 wallets have been created in all. Atop all of the metrics listed, total transactions numbering close to 300,000 complemented the growth in the ecosystem across the board.

Scalability is notably a major challenge for most protocols as it is technically difficult to achieve scalability and decentralization easily. zkSync solves this problem through its hyperscalability feature that tends to process an unlimited number of transactions without a marginal impact on security or cost.

The launch of zkSync has been tagged as the future of scalability on Ethereum, and many legacy users of the network are gradually coming to appreciate what the scaling outfit is bringing to the table.

With solutions for scalability being floated by zkSync, the bar is currently being raised for the so-called Ethereum killers who boast of higher scalability and plan to use this as a basis for dethroning Ethereum as the biggest smart contract hub.

While zkSync is also raising the bar for Ethereum-based scalability protocols, Polygon has tapped into the ZK technology with the launch of the zkEVM protocol. The ZK innovations are being backed by many of the top developers on Ethereum, including Vitalik Buterin, who signed the first transaction when Polygon's zkEVM protocol launched.

Ethereum is changing hands at $1,807.97, up 3.10% in the past week, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

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zkSync Taking Spotlight on Ethereum, Here Are Latest Metrics - U.Today