CasperLabs Weekly Update, 22nd September 2020: March to Mainnet
Update Summary
Over the year, the team has been working hard towards the launch of mainnet and so far we’ve been on track. The community wanted us to give an update on the roadmap and progress so, during the call, our program manager Ashok Ranadive shared an update on the roadmap.
September
- Theme: Implement equivocation bomb resistance, slashing, and launch of Charlie Testnet.
- Strategic Objective: Build developer community, launch Rust node.
- Features/Work: Implement transaction fees and security.
October
- Theme: Launch Delta testnet with code complete features like economic security, seignorage, equivocation detection and slashing, etc.
- Strategic Objective: Decentralize and kick-off attack phase, begin the process of creating the final genesis block, sign up more enterprise-level stake pools.
- Features/Work: Mainnet genesis contract, vesting contracts, final Mint/Token contract with the release schedule.
November
- Strategic Objective: Security review, bug fixes, performance tuning, accounts-contract unification, payments 2.0, hardening.
December
- Strategic Objective: Hardening the network against attacks.
We aim to launch by mid-late December, however, this is more of a business decision. From a code perspective, we aim to be code complete (code freeze) by November and then focus on bug fixes, hardening, and security review.
Engineering status
- The team is glad to have hit the milestone for September. The September milestone was to launch the Charlie test-net (a wholly Rust node network).
- During the launching of the Charlie testnet, a couple of validators scripted a token transfer test processing about 2,500 transactions in about a minute. This was achieved without any optimization or performance tuning on the network.
- The Charlie test-net was up for 5 days before we ran into a now identified stability issue that filled up the storage with logs.
- We’ve reconfigured and fined tuned data logging to enhance the stability of the Rust network.
- Interested participants for the testnet can sign up using the guide.
- The team has entered into the third weekly sprint of the 0.20.1 release cycle (Sprint 6.3).
- The focus of this cycle is to launch Delta Testnet with a minimum of 50 validators. This release will incorporate all economic rewards as well as security and implement ‘Event Stream’ for that will send events to all subscribers.
- The update and security team is simulating the event of a network partition. This is to ensure that the protocol can ‘heal’ and maintain liveness in the case of a fork.
- This test has been done for the current Node software and we’ll carry out a similar test for the Charlie network.
Current Focus
- On Highway we’re implementing validator set rotation, bonding auctions, slashing, implementation of Highway Core security features (defenses against equivocation based spam attacks).
- We’re updating the Highway paper to chronicle newly discovered attack vectors and how we’re mitigating them.
Node — Rust
- Implementing event stream for the rust node. This is to enable the node stream events which will subsequently be put into a Kafka-type interface to help reduce the burden on the node from data queries.
- Adding enhancements to the Rust client to bring it up to par with the Scala and python client.
- Implementation of rewards and transaction fee distribution. On the current version of the testnet, transaction fees are pooled in the Proof-of-Stake contract so right now, we’re working on distributing these fees to validators in the coming release.
- Adding the ability to fetch linear chain blocks by block-height. Dissemination of block information does not occur linearly in a DAG protocol, this pull request adds the ability for nodes to be able to retroactively fetch blocks to catch up with other nodes on the network.
- Updating pricing for all resources including Host side functions and Storage.
Ecosystem
- We’re deploying our new blog. We have implemented a GitHub workflow that’ll enable our developers to create blog posts via GitHub.
- We’re building a new CLarity explorer for the Rust network and adding other improvements to its UI/UX.
- Design of Payments 2.0. Payments 2.0 enables enhanced use-cases for Defi and economic applications such as smart contract staking etc.
- Creating a Token Standard for Casper. This would serve as a basic standard for implementing tokens on the Casper network eg. ERC-20 standard on Ethereum.
- Adding new updates to the designs of the Casper Generic Voting App.
Economics Research
- Prototype for ChainLink-Casper adaptor.
- Investigate Gas Futures and write specifications for the same. We’ll plan on implementing gas futures for the stability of gas fees on the network. This would enable our users to pay for compute resources in future blocks.
Presentation
- Our program manager Ashok Ranadive shares an update on the roadmap.
Team & Community
- We are searching for talented SRE’s to join our team.
- Applications can be sent via Workable. Alternatively, via email.
- We have adopted a Casper Enhancement Proposal (CEP) process to vet and accept important features and changes. Details of the process can be found here https://github.com/CasperLabs/ceps.
- 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.
