CasperLabs Weekly Update, 4th August 2020: Supporting Defi On Casper Protocol

4 min readAug 7, 2020

Supporting Defi On CasperLabs

Decentralized finance (Defi) is an emerging frontier in blockchain, we at CasperLabs are excited about the promise that Defi holds in revolutionizing the way we think about finance. We have built into our blockchain some unique and native features that would help Defi ecosystems scale and introduce new dynamics into the blockchain sphere. Among these are:

CBC-Casper protocol: The CBC-Casper protocol is a fault-tolerant, highly secure protocol that is permissionless. We are optimizing the consensus overhead to make the protocol as accessible as possible. This inherently secures the network from attack as it raises the cost of carrying out an attack significantly. Also, the CBC-Casper protocol has provable finality as opposed to probabilistic finality on the Bitcoin or Ethereum network.
Native Smart contract governance: We offer great governance tools for smart contracts at layer one. Our protocol allows contract authors to govern their on-chain code in a fully transparent manner, we have provided tools like multi-key signatures, weighted keys, account delegation, Smart contract versioning. With our platform, smart contract authors would be able to specify how contracts are upgraded, who can call the contract, what protocol version on which the Smart contract runs on. We’ve validated this already, we’ve had conversations with some big Defi protocols, and their number one concern is governance.
Smart contract test framework: In Casper protocol, our tooling enables developers to pre-populate the global state within a test harness that can be run on a built server like Travis, Drone, or Jenkins. With this developers can test and simulate their Smart contracts extensively before it would be deployed.
Smart Contract staking: In our protocol, Defi contracts would be able to stake the tokens that are locked within them. This enables Defi protocols to participate in the consensus of the network and earn seigniorage resulting in higher yields.

Engineering Status

The team has entered the fourth and final sprint of the Node 0.20.8 release cycle (Sprint 4.4). The focus of this cycle is to stand up a minimum of 20 validator network in the new Rust Node with certain economic features like bonding/unbonding, bonding auctions, and Seigniorage, etc.
Node 0.20.1 was released on Friday, 31 July 2020. Release 0.20.1 fixes bugs found in Contract Runtime, Clarity, and the Python Client earlier in the week.
Beta Testnet was kicked off on Monday, 03 August 2020 at 19:00hrs UTC with 55 validators.
With the launch of Beta Testnet, we’ll be kicking off our developer engagement program as developers can now build fully-fledged dApps on Casper blockchain with the platform now being code-complete for smart contract features.
39 Validators are in sync, 8 have not updated their node and 8 are timed out.
We had a communications issue at the start of the beta where some validators shared the ‘hash’ of their public key instead of the public key itself. This caused the accounts.csv data to be incorrect and these validators were left out of the network. We will bounce the network to make the correction and get all validators on the network.

Current Focus

Extending the Integration Test Framework for Highway Core with Liveness Tests with and without equivocation.
Final implementation of Bonding auctions.
Implementation of the validator set rotation.
We will not do any additional work on the Scala Node. There will only be fixing of bugs reported on the Testnet.
Contract Runtime is mostly feature-complete but we’d like to make a change to the runtime that involves simplifying accounts and contracts into a single type, this means that modules and functionalities like accounts, staking, etc would be a contract.
We’ll be setting up another instance of the Testnet. This Testnet will run with a handful of Validators on the Rust version of the node software before we’ll migrate other Validators to the network from the Scala node.

Ecosystem

We’ve created a CasperLabs ecosystem organization repository, this is going to be a completely open organization for building on the CasperLabs ecosystem and we will be moving CLarity into this repository.
Extending Solidity Transpiler.
Updating ERC20 and Key/Value Storage contract with DSL.

Economics

Working on the token vintage model. This is a staking feature that offers more rewards to Validators that are bonded to the network for a longer period. Basically, the more you stay bonded the more rewards you’re likely to receive.
Resolving Chainlink contract deployment issues.

Presentation

Our CTO, Medha Parlikar discusses Defi on Casper
Our Economist Alexander Limonov gives a talk on Auction Design Alternatives

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 12:00 am Pacific (4 pm Japanese Time).
The zoom meeting id is https://casperlabs.zoom.us/j/924713678.