CasperLabs Update 19th May: Inclusion Bonds — Making ‘free gas’ work for Validators and Delegators

3 min readMay 21, 2020

Update summary

This week at CasperLabs, the team started a new release cycle for Node 0.20, during the previous Testnet release, we introduced the notion of Omega blocks, this enables non-leader nodes to be able to propose blocks which would later be finalized by the leader Node at the end of a given round. Omega blocks would increase throughput on the network by enabling faster block proposal time. We’ll be making a more detailed blog post on Omega blocks.

Also, we’re enabling support for multi-cryptographic algorithms. This feature would capacitate CasperLabs blockchain to support Ethereum account keys, secure enclave for hardware wallets as well as ED25519 encryption.

Onur Solmaz gives a presentation on “Inclusion Bonds: Making ‘free gas’ work for Validators and Delegators”.

Engineering

The team has started a new release cycle and entered into the first of the four weekly sprints (Sprint 2.1).
The team has released Node 0.19 on GitHub and it’s currently undergoing stress testing with the Test and SRE team.
For the next four weeks, the team is going to be working on upgrading the Testnet with contract headers as well as multiple key support.
We’re creating a unified storage model on the Rust portion of the Node.
Enhancing the Key-gen tool to support account hashes and update GraphQL Schema to support multi-cryptographic algorithms.

Testnet

We observed that the Testnet was not stable with 18.1. We had to bounce the network and restart again with all validators on CasperLabs Node 0.18.2 (2f2273e1486985181123ddcd9501dc3e02d73e38).
Testnet was restarted on 2020–05–13 at 19:00hrs UTC.
During this round, we introduce the notion of Omega blocks. An Omega block functions as both a witness and a state update. This feature enables the node to propose a transaction by creating an Omega block instead of Omega ballot when the deploy buffer contains deploys to process.
We are observing issues with 4 nodes and also the multiple era bonding issues. We are piloting fixes with 2 validators.

Current status

We are testing Node 0.19 with deploy gossiping on our Long-running test framework.
Moving from accounts identified by public key bytes to an account hash to support a multi-cryptographic signature algorithm. This would enable us to use multiple encryption schemes that support Ethereum accounts, secure enclave as well as ED25519 encryption in our notion of accounts.
As a result of the multi-cryptographic signature algorithm, we would be updating the python client, CLarity explorer, smart-contracts.
Building CasperLabs JS stack. This would enable users to be able to send deploys, transactions, and call smart contracts directly from their browser interface.