The dev team has begun sprint 25. Medha is working on the Node 0.10 release plan which is scheduled for December 19. The dev team is currently focused on the implementation plan for the CasperLabs highway protocol. The team is also researching an algorithm that determines the correctness of the fork choice rule.
The team will be running a critical test simulator for the naive CasperLabs blockchain (NCB) to be used as a performance benchmark. Onur Solmaz recently presented a demo on the economics of reward distribution for validators based on the points they received. You can view the demo HERE.
Engineering Status
Planning
- The team has completed Sprint 24 and started Sprint 25.
- Node 0.10 release on 19 Dec to include work done in the sprint #25 (02–13 Dec).
- We have a proposed feature roadmap plan for future releases laid out
Release
- Last release: Node 0.9.1 with a patch that fixes a bug in the Voting Matrix and CLarity.
- DevNet is updated with the new software.
- Structured Logging
Interact with the network at https://clarity.casperlabs.io
Current Focus
- Implementation engineering plan for full CasperLabs Highway Protocol and dependencies worked out — under review.
- POC for test environment and automation.
- Performance and stabilization
- Adding more functionality to Clarity
- The groundwork for benchmarking alternative fork choice rule
Consensus
- Efficient implementations of Fork Choice and Validation of Equivocation detection and slashing
- We have developed a detailed engineering plan and dependency graph for the implementation of Highway
- We continue to work on Simulator that will help run critical tests to understand and benchmark different algorithms
Execution Engine
- Contract Headers.
- Providing get_balance endpoint.
- Proposal for removing stateful FFI
Node
- Stability, Optimizations, and Performance of Node
Test and SRE
- Devnet Security
- Automation: Ansible and Terraform
- Write a System-wide tolerance document
- Testbed Environment
Ecosystem
- Building ZKSNARK Example.
- Reviewing and organizing technical documentation. Updating user guide for node operators.
- Key generation for Casperlabs-client.
Economics Research
- We also continue to work on the theoretical economic research and modeling of the protocol.
- Modeling for game-theoretic study and comparison with Electricity Utility pricing.
- Studying point-based reward distribution for Highway.
Team & Company Update
- Bart Kaminski started this week with the Execution Engine team.
- The team is adjusting the roadmap taking into account the new approach to full Highway implementation.
DevNet has been released that includes the following:
A publicly available network supporting the following features:
- Assumes all honest validators
- Validator bonding / unbonding
- Faucet for deployments and bonding requests
- Mint & Token Contract
- Secure deployments, with payment code and session code
- Smart block gossiping
- Gas processed metrics
- Genesis process
- Support for GraphQL
Governance Status
- Meetings are Tuesday mornings @ 9 am PDT
- Meeting this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8cpOvfk1DQ
- Zoom Link: https://casperlabs.zoom.us/j/488766416 & live streamed on YouTube.
- Governance research Repository
Watch: Economics demo by Onur Solmaz: point based reward distribution
Here Onur Solmaz demonstrates incentivization and reward distribution mechanism for validators on a point base.
