Social consensus defines what happens in the event of a critical failure of consensus on the network. In the event of a critical failure, validators would have to get together and decide out of protocol on the best means to help the network recover.
In the event of a critical failure, there’s no consensus on the heaviest block. It means the network has split and no longer agrees on the last finalized block. Validators would be able to detect this by observing the status endpoints on their nodes or CLarity. In the case of a critical consensus failure, validators would have to verify which of the chains is legitimate, which chain isn’t legitimate, who equivocated, what transactions aren’t legitimate, what the last finalized legitimate block was, etc. After which they’ll roll back their internal state to the last finalized block. We’ll provide an API that’ll enable the validators to identify the last finalized block, roll back the global state to the last finalized block, identify legitimate transactions and validate them, identify the validators that equivocated, slash them and subsequently restart the network.
While we’re building the Casper protocol to be able to resist equivocation by default by preventing it from happening at the protocol level and by creating an algorithm that will prevent active validators from equivocating, we do understand that we’re advancing into a new frontier and there’s a need to provide fail-safe mechanisms to enhance the security of the network and ensure that the network would persist in the event of an attack.
We’re still designing how Social consensus would work in principle and we’ll like to hear your thoughts and opinion on Social consensus. Reach us on Telegram or via our Discord channels
Engineering status
- The team has entered into the first weekly sprint of the 0.20.10 release cycle (Sprint 6.1). 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 features and implement ‘Events Stream’ that will send events to all subscribers.
- In the 0.20.10 Release Cycle, we are also focusing on doing design and specification work for some crucial features like ‘State Pruning & Garbage Collection’, ‘Unification of Accounts and Contracts’ and ‘Payments 2.0’ which will enable several use cases.
Current Focus
- The team is focused on bootstrapping the Charlie testnet for the rust node.
- We’re implementing infrastructure for improved testing around the consensus and operation of Rust Node.
- On the Highway protocol, we’re implementing slashing, validator set rotation, and Highway core security features.
- Design and documentation work on Key Management: Integration with Cold and Hardware Wallets, off-line/online dispatch feature.
- Prototyping ChainLink-CL adaptor.
- We’re investigating internet engineering task force (IETF) documents and other projects for best practices.
Presentation
- Medha Parlikar talks on Bonding Auctions on the Casper network.
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.
Team & Company Update
- Henry Till rejoined the team starting this week.
- Two more developers would be joining the team this September.
- We’re still hiring! Open positions are;
- Full-stack developers
- Core rust engineers
- SRE
- Technical writers
- Applications can be sent via Workable. Alternatively, send us a mail.
