CasperLabs Weekly Update, 20th October 2020: Time Frame for Mainnet
Update Summary
CasperLabs Switzerland hosted a Meetup at CVLabs in Zug, earlier during the week, and they streamed the event live on YouTube. We are also excited to let our community know that we have closed our $14M private validator token sale led by crypto fund Digital Strategies.
The Team started the third weekly sprint of the 0.20.11 release cycle (Sprint 7.3). At the end of this cycle, a release candidate will be cut and deployed in the LRT framework for testing for a week. The version, after fixing any bugs identified during the testing, will be deployed to update Delta Testnet. We’re preparing for security audits and review of the platform which would kick off in mid-November.
On the Mainnet timeframe, given that the Chinese new year comes up in February our business team will have to decide on an appropriate timeline for main net launch but we expect to be ready by Q4 from the engineering perspective and we’ll be rapidly iterating and adding more features to the network even after Mainnet launch. We will go into security review and audit in November and plan on being ready by December but for we to launch the Main net successfully, we need to work with a custody provider and the custody provider needs time to be ready, and they have given us a tentative time of the end of January to be production-ready. This means our custody provider will soon start the implementation of software wallets, hardware wallets, and an entire suite of end-to-end custody solutions then we’ll go into production testing in January and the main net launch will happen after that.
Engineering status
- The Team has started the third weekly sprint of the 0.20.11 release cycle (Sprint 7.3).
- At the end of this cycle, a release candidate will be cut 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.
- We have released the October release candidate for the node, which will form the basis of the Delta testnet. This release is in the LRT test framework and would be deployed to the testnet after we complete the tests.
- The Beta-testnet is stable and we’ll be releasing a new sign-up sheet for the Delta testnet because we need to create a new key generation file.
- We’re working on getting the Rust client published to crates so it will be easier to install the Rust client.
Current Focus
- We’re preparing for security audits and review of the platform which would kick off in mid-November.
- Enhancing Highway security: Endorsements and fork bomb protection.
- Fixing bugs: Consensus doesn’t appear to recover after a liveness failure
- Adaptive round length strategy.
- Improve testing: We’re building a robust test harness for the consensus component.
- Create a test suite for the client-rs.
- Reduce Technical Debt: Clean up chain specs, including block height and total gas in block info, user fetcher, and gossiper for vertices.
- We found some issues with node joining and rejoining on the Delta testnet release candidate, and it’s being worked on.
- 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.
Contract Runtime
- Updates to support transfer transaction ‘proofs’. What this means is that if Alex sends Bob money, Alex would want some proof of how much was spent along with some Merkle proofs this update provides the proofs.
- Implement Storage Costs. For the time being, the cost of storage would be a one-time fee, but subsequently, we intend to implement garbage collection and rent.
Ecosystem
- To prepare for the Delta testnet, we want to have Clarity for Rust network setup and support deploys from the browser.
- Clarity: various UI/UX enhancements.
- We’ve been working on updating the dApp developer guide.
- Implementation of Event Store.
Presentation
- Medha Parlikar talks about the Mainnet launch time frame.
Team & Company Update
- We are excited to let our community know that we have closed our $14M private validator token sale led by crypto fund Digital Strategies. Read more on our Blog.
- 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
- CasperLabs Switzerland hosted a Meetup at CVLabs in Zug, earlier during the week, and they streamed the event live on YouTube.
- 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.
