CasperLabs Weekly Update, 1st September 2020: Throughput on Casper Network

3 min readSep 4, 2020

Update Summary

This week at CasperLabs, the team entered the last weekly sprint (5.4) for Node 0.20.09. As part of this release cycle, we’ll be delivering a Rust Client with feature parity as the current python client and we expect to unveil the Rust node by next week. We’re implementing Transaction Fee distribution, prior to now, tokens received as fees from transactions on the Testnet were burned. We’re now implementing a mechanism to distribute tokens received as fees to Validators.

We’re designing and implementing payments 2.0 features, this unifies the notions of accounts and contracts on the contract runtime. One key feature that this enables is the ability of Smart Contracts to be able to stake tokens that are locked within them and yield higher returns for DeFi use-cases.

A major focus of the current release cycle (Node 0.20.09), is the design and specification for Social consensus in the case of a catastrophic failure of the network. During the community update call this week, Medha Parlikar talks about the concept of social consensus and transactions speed on the Casper network.

Engineering status

The team has entered the last weekly sprint of the 0.20.09 release cycle The focus of this cycle is to deliver additional economic features (transaction fees), security features (slashing). The team is also working on Client API and will deliver a Rust Client that has feature parity as the current Python Client using the Client API.
The plans on unveiling the rust node by the next week.
In the 20.09 Release Cycle, we are also focusing on doing design and specification work for some crucial features like ‘Check Pointing’, and mechanism for ‘Social Consensus’ in the extreme case of a consensus failure.
This cycle will also prepare for a pre-delta testnet of the Rust network with about 5–10 validators.
Beta Testnet is planned to be restarted with additional validators in the second week of September 2020, this restart will include validators who were not included in the previous Genesis.

Current Focus

We are working on the implementation of slashing for Highway.
We’re also implementing core security features against spam attacks and equivocation catastrophe for Highway.
Extending Rust CLI client to include more features as can be found in the python client in Node API.
Adding costing for host side functions (token transfers), and Storage costs.
Implementing Transaction Fee distribution. Before now tokens received as fees from transactions weren’t distributed to Validators. We’re now implementing a mechanism to distribute tokens received as fees to Validators.
Adding node /status endpoint for monitoring.
Design and documentation work on Key Management: Integration with Cold and Hardware Wallets, off-line/online dispatch feature.
Implement metrics of Clarity with the help of Prometheus.
Designing and implementing payments 2.0 features. This unifies the notions of accounts and contracts on the contract runtime. One key feature that this enables is the ability of Smart Contracts to be able to stake token that are locked within them and yield higher returns for DeFi use cases.

Economics

Design of Social Consensus in the event of a catastrophic failure.
Revising token vintage model.

Presentation

Medha Parlikar talks about the concept of social consensus and token transfer/Sec on the Casper network.

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 midnight Pacific (4 pm Japanese Time).
The zoom meeting id is https://casperlabs.zoom.us/j/924713678.