CasperLabs Update 7th July 2020: Developer Engagement Program Announced!
Update summary
Our Beta Testnet is slated for release this July, to mark the release of our Beta Testnet, we will be kicking off our developer engagement program with rewards in CLX tokens. This would help attract developers, validators among others to build dApps on the CasperLabs blockchain. More information on this is available here.
We’re in the process of finalizing the tests for Node 0.20 release, this release comes with support for Ethereum keys, a solidity transpiler, contract headers, Omega blocks, and bug fixes. We’re running a Token Transfer per Second (TTPS) test, this will help inform us on the speed, configurations and help in fine-tuning of the protocol. We expect preliminary results to be out in the coming weeks.
From the Economics team, Alex Limonov gives a presentation on “Designing an Auction Model for Validator Auctions”, Our CTO gives a talk on “Building a Blockchain for Enterprise Adoption”.
Engineering Status
- We’re in the process of finalizing the tests for Node 0.20 release
- The Testnet was restarted last weekend and we implemented a number of Bug fixes.
- We’ll be opening up the Validator set to allow up to 50 validators during the launch of the Beta Testnet.
- We’ll be kicking off our developer engagement program with 50MM credits worth of rewards at the launch of our Beta-Testnet.
- In the third phase of our Testnet, we’ll be offering 75MM credits worth of rewards to participants. During this period we will be opening the network to external attacks and extensive tests.
- The idea is that during the second and third phases of the Testnet, Validators will build malicious nodes and attack the network when it is fully specified.
Testnet
- The last testnet stood up for 40 days before being rebooted for bug fixes
- Currently, 20 validators are in sync with the new code and no major issues have been encountered yet, 3 validators have yet to update and we will be reaching out to them. One validator has a misconfiguration with their JVM heap max size and is also being reached out to.
Current Focus
- On Highway, we’ve implemented the fork choice rule, round length and we’re working on random verifiable bits for the Leader selection mechanism.
- We’re implementing a unit testing test harness for consensus.
- We’re implementing, integrating, and testing Chainspec. The Chainspec contains the Manifest.toml and Accounts.csv and the intention is to make it easy for anyone to download the Chainspec and join the network.
- We’re mostly feature-complete with Contract runtime and will revisit after Rust Node implementation for any additional features.
- We’re running a Token Transfer per Second (TTPS) test, this will help inform us on the speed, configurations and help in fine-tuning of the protocol.
- STests: Testing the latest STest release for throughput under varying scale (5/10/15/20 node network).
Ecosystem
- Coming with the release of Node 0.20 is support for Ethereum Keys
- We’ll also be delivering a toolchain that will support solidity contract so that developers will be able to transpile their Solidity contract to WASM
- We’re also improving the CasperLabs signer to use file upload as part of the login.
Economics
- We’re building the technical specifications for the Validator bonding auctions
- We’re also writing the formal specification for Gas and Metering model including storage and Bandwidth
- On storage, we envisage holding X amount of tokens to be able to access Y amount of storage and/or burning fees used for storage.
Community
- Our weekly Governance/Community call holds every Tuesday
- Time: 9:00 AM PST (16:00 UTC, Sydney +11, Beijing +8, Greece +3, Amsterdam +2, Onitsha +1, New York -4, Seattle -7)
- Location: https://casperlabs.zoom.us/j/488766416
- Our weekly workshops/dApp Session holds twice a week on:
- Thursdays 07:00 am Pacific time and
- Fridays 12:00 am Pacific (4 pm Japanese Time).
- The zoom meeting id is https://casperlabs.zoom.us/j/924713678.
