CasperLabs Weekly Update, 3rd November 2020: Product Demo on IPwe-Casper integration.

3 min readNov 7, 2020

Update Summary

The team has started the first weekly sprint of the 0.20.12 release cycle (Sprint 8.1), the network will support up to 100 validator slots in the bonding auction, and validators can bid for open slots by using the bidding API. We’re preparing for the security audit of our smart contracts and consensus protocol in preparation for the launch of mainnet. During the call, Ashok Ranadive presents an interesting demo on IPwe-Casper integration.

We celebrated our second anniversary on October 31st. CasperLabs was founded exactly 10 years after the bitcoin white paper was released. We’ve published a blog post looking at what lies ahead for the network and the team.

Engineering status

The team has started the first weekly sprint of the 0.20.12 release cycle (Sprint 8.1).
Release 0.20.12 delivers prioritized bug fixes, networking improvements, and more consensus protocol security features.
The network will support up to 100 validator slots in the bonding auction, and validators can bid for open slots by using the bidding API.

Current Focus

Preparation for the security audit for the consensus protocol.
Enhancing Highway security: Enforce maximum round exponent.
We’re working on node joining/rejoining. We’ve improved security on how nodes join/rejoin the network.
Optimizing memory usage of the node, improving testing of the node, and making serialization more efficient.
Test and SRE team are working on hardening the nodes against DOS attacks.

Ecosystem

Clarity for Rust network: integration with Event Store.
We’re working on translations for the website and blog.

Economics Research

Block proposer: Design initial gas pricing model. Ethereum gas pricing and block packing review. This is for the design of how we’re going to price gas at launch.
Creating a graphical representation of staking auction business logic.

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

Ashok Ranadive presents a demo on IPwe-Casper integration

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

We celebrated our second anniversary on October 31st. CasperLabs was founded exactly 10 years after the bitcoin white paper was released. We’ve published a blog post on the state of the Casper network.
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.