CasperLabs Update 16th June 2020: Autonomous Gas Pricing Adjustments
Update summary
This week at CasperLabs, the team entered its first weekly sprint for Sprint 3.1 just after they’ve had the third virtual off-site to plan out the next release cycle. On the ecosystem front, we are building a Domain Specific Language (DSL) to make writing smart contracts on the CasperLabs blockchain easier and faster. On the Testnet, work on Node 0.20 is coming along smoothly and as part of our Beta-testnet plan, we will be adding more Nodes and running some Validator games as well.
Also on the call, we had an open discussion on storage-fee structure, and a presentation by our Economist, Onur Solmaz on Autonomous Gas Pricing Adjustments, listen in on these and share your feedback or what you think on our Discord server or on Telegram
Engineering Status
- The team had its third virtual off-site on 12 June 2020. During these off-sites, we cut new releases, and plan out the next release cycle (comprising four weekly sprints).
- We entered the first weekly sprint (Sprint 3.1) of Node 0.20.07 release cycle on the 15th of this month.
- Node 0.20 release would be cut at the end of this week and would be tested for 7 days in LRT before updating Testnet.
Testnet
- Our testnet has been running stably and we now have 29 nodes on the testnet. 24 are consensus forming nodes and 5 are read-only nodes.
- As part of our Beta-testnet plan, we’ll be adding more nodes to the testnet.
- The target is to have around 40–50 nodes during this time frame. We’ll also be reaching out to large staking pools for potential participation on our Beta-testnet.
- We have discovered 19 bugs in total during the testnet, 17 have been fixed and 1 is being worked on and 1 being triage. We’ll be deploying most of these fixes as part of Node 0.20.0.
- If you’re an organization or individual and want to participate in our Beta-testnet you can sign up here.
Current focus
- We’re working on improving the efficiency of token transfers
- On the Scala version of the Node, we’re fixing bugs before implementing them on the testnet.
- On the rust side of the Node, we’re implementing Era supervisor and deploy gossiping
- We’re testing bug fixes on Node 0.20 of our Long-Running Test framework.
Ecosystem
- We’re building a Domain Specific Language (DSL) to make writing smart contracts on the CasperLabs blockchain easier and faster.
- Supporting Contract-Headers, Multiple keys signature algorithms and WASM-less transfer in CLarity and Python client.
- Update Vesting Contract with Contract Headers.
Economics Research
- Designing cross peg/price link for fixing execution/storage prices in fiat.
- Update seigniorage formulation to account for omega blocks.
- Port fee market simulator to Rust.
Discussion/Presentation
- On the call, there was an open discussion on storage-fee structure.
- Onur Solmaz gives a presentation on Autonomous Gas Pricing Adjustments.
