CasperLabs Weekly Update, 20th October 2020: Casper Protocol a Better Option for Enterprises

3 min readOct 31, 2020

Update Summary

We’re in the last stages of articulating rewards for the Delta testnet, approving and distributing reward for the Alpha and Beta testnet, we’re also working on the sign-up sheet for the Delta testnet and getting the rust client ready for key generation. We would need all validators to regenerate their keys for the Delta testnet as part of this process. On the economics front, the team is analyzing node-splitting incentives with the auction model. This is an analysis of how validators can game the auction system by splitting themselves into multiple validators.

During the call, Medha Parlikar talks about Why Casper is the best option for big enterprises.

Engineering status

The team has started the fourth weekly sprint of the 0.20.11 release cycle (Sprint 7.4). The focus of this cycle is the distribution of transaction fees, adaptive round length, proof of transfer, ability for the validator to join the network securely using trusted hash from the current era, and additional security including protection from deploy replay attack.
At the end of this cycle, a release candidate will be released and deployed in LRT for testing for a week. The version, after fixing any bugs identified during the testing, will be deployed to update Delta Testnet. This version of Delta will support 100 validators.
The Rust network (code name Charlie) with 15 validators was relaunched on Thursday, 15 October 2020. Currently, 9 validators are active. The network is stable and is processing deploys.

Current Focus

We are implementing an adaptive round length strategy network. Highway protocol is partially synchronous, so validators can choose when to propose blocks, this feature makes the protocol more robust.
Enhancing Highway security: Endorsements and fork bomb protection.
Adaptive era initialization with the median of round exponents from the previous era. Within an Era, validators can slow down or speed up, but when we initialize a new, we use the median of round exponents from the previous era.
Node joining/rejoining: verification of the model
We’re enabling the node to support restarts to the deploy buffer to maintain the persistence of the deploys in the deploy buffer.
Slashing: we’re implementing an algorithm to force block proposers to slash faulty validators
Proof of transfer: The client should validate the block returned by “get-block” against the block hash. Basically, what this means is when you transfer a token from person A to person B you see what the transaction fees are for that token transfer, how much they sent out, etc.
We’re automating our release processes because we expect that as we move towards Delta testnet, we’ll be iterating rapidly and we want to release patches and updates rapidly.

Ecosystem

Website and blog: we updated our brand messaging, new design, and various UI/UX enhancements.
Documentation updates: updating developer guide for the rust node.
Implementation of Event Store: we’ll be offloading queries to the event store through the API endpoints so that nodes are not overloaded with query events.

Economics

Analysis of node-splitting incentives with the auction model. This is an analysis of how validators can game the auction system by splitting themselves into multiple validators.

Contract Runtime

We’ve added Merkle proofs to query state responses. Merkle proofs provide trusted data for queries on the network. This enables dApp developers to get trusted data without having to run their own nodes.
Implementing Storage Costs to optimize the use of space on the network.

Presentation

Medha Parlikar talks about Why Casper is the best option for big enterprises.

Team & Company Update

We are looking for talented SRE’s, Developer advocates, and Technical writers to join our team.
Applications can be sent via Workable. Alternatively, via email.

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.