Update summary
This week at CasperLabs, our CTO, Medha Parlikar gives a walkthrough on CLarity; CasperLab’s blockchain explorer, Alexander Limonov from our Economics team gives a presentation on “The Features and processes of a business-friendly blockchain”, the dev team entered their fourth and the last sprint of the current release cycle which is slated to end with the release Node 0.19 in the coming week. One of the new features to come with Node 0.19 release is deploy gossiping, this feature enables transactions to be broadcasted to Nodes across the network to ensure faster time to finalization.
We’re designing a two-layer network that should enable validators to optimize their nodes for effective validation of blocks while still being able to process queries on transactions, network state, and other non-deterministic functions without the risk of slashing due to equivocation or downtime as a result of being overloaded with traffic from non-deterministic queries.
Also, we’re building the CasperLabs JS stack, this would enable users to send deploys, transactions and call smart contracts directly from their browser interface.
Engineering
- Node 0.18.2 patch was released on May 11th, 2020. This patch addresses issues with the fork choice rule and block finalization.
- The team has entered the fourth and last sprint of the current release cycle,
- At the end of the sprint, we would be releasing Node 0.19 which is currently under stress testing, it is expected to be due by 18th May 2020.
- Included in the Node 0.19 release is deploy gossiping, this enables transactions to be broadcasted to Nodes across the network to ensure faster time to finalization.
Current Focus
- We’re creating a rust implementation of “pothole” and integrating a generic synchronizer with it.
- We’re designing a consensus agnostic era logic. Era’s are useful for state pruning, fork-choice simplification.
- Design of a two-layer network — A validator network and a Gossip/Query network. This would enable the validators to optimize their nodes to effectively validate blocks while still being able to process queries on transactions, network state, and other non-deterministic functions without the risk of slashing due to equivocation or downtime as a result of being overloaded with traffic from non-deterministic queries.
- We’re also evaluating repurposing the Scala node to a gossip network in the proposed two-layer design.
- Testing a framework for optimizing the gas model. This would enable us to meter things like bandwidth, storage among others.
- On the Test and SRE side, we’re testing some network metrics like Token transfer/Sec and we’re looking to scale up the testing infrastructure to be able to subject the network to test under full load.
Ecosystem
- We’re migrating our CLarity explorer to be able to use contract headers to enable it to view different contract meta-data on the network.
- Building CasperLabs JS stack. This would enable users to be able to send deploys, transactions, and call smart contracts directly from their browser interface.
- We would be moving the token vesting contract to a separate repository on Github. The vesting contract would hold vested tokens from the private validator offering, employee token contract, etc. We would also make it available to developers who may want to integrate some form of vesting into their smart contracts.
- We’ll be developing an on-chain voting dApp. Our goal is to use voting on the blockchain on our testnet for our upcoming Hackathon in June.
Team/Community
- We’re working on onboarding community developers through Hackathons and workshops
- We have new timings for our weekly workshops- Friday 07:00 am Pacific and Friday 12:00 am Pacific (4 pm Japan Time). The zoom meeting id is https://casperlabs.zoom.us/j/924713678.
Presentations
- Our Economist, Alexander Limonov gives a presentation on “Features and processes of a business-friendly blockchain”
- Medha gives a Walkthrough on CLarity; CasperLabs blockchain explorer.
Want to get started?
At release, links to installation packages and relevant documentation are available on GitHub.
Where can bugs be filed?
Report a bug on GitHub
