Casper for DeFi: February 24, 2021 Community Call

On our last community call in February, we talked about our partnership with PlasmaPay, a global digital payment platform enabling seamless entry into decentralized finance. PlasmaPay founder and CEO Ilia Maksimenka joined the call, along with Medha Parlikar, Neil Kapoor, and Ashok Ranadive from CasperLabs. On the call, the group discussed the partnership with PlasmaPay and the future of DeFi on Casper.

How does PlasmaPay help to make DeFi accessible and what value proposition does PlasmaPay bring?
Ilia: Our main mission is to build a convenient UI/UX for retail users and mass adoption. We’ve been working on PlasmaPay for the past three years. Right now, we’re working with Visa and Mastercard, banks, and e-wallets all over the world. One of the first stages of our partnership and integration with Casper will provide an on-ramp for fiat and banks with the Casper ecosystem. Using our infrastructure, the community will be able to purchase Casper tokens and other tokens that will be built on the Casper blockchain with just a credit card.

How do you see the fiat on-ramp working?
Iliya: Currently, we are mostly using Ethereum’s infrastructure because this is a core DeFi ecosystem and most of the liquidy exists. We are building a bridge with one of our solutions called the hyperloop. This will bridge the Ethereum, Binance, and the Casper blockchains. With this bridge, we will be able to move liquidity and tokens between these blockchains. The second step for us will be to build decentralized exchanges on the different blockchains and bridge them.

Another big part of this partnership is wallet integration. One of the major goals for the new blockchains is to spread their infrastructure across different levels with the different partners and to support the Casper wallet with our official PlasmaPay application.

What feature of PlasmaPay puts it ahead of its competitors?
Iliya: Our competitive advantage is that we’re combining the fiat and cryptocurrency accounts in one place. Also, the cryptocurrency account is non-custodial and this is the first time in the market that a company can combine both a fiat payment system with a blockchain account.

When are we expecting Casper on PlasmaPay?
Iliya: It depends on how deep the integration is. If it is just a wallet integration, we’ll just have to set up a node of Casper and do a very basic integration but if it is a deeper integration like using CSPR for the actual payments can a couple of months.

Technical Update

Execution

• The team has started the third weekly sprint of the 21.03 release cycle (Sprint 11.3). Release 21.03 marks the first production version of the Casper protocol.
• This release will bring protocol upgrades, performance, and hardening improvements. The protocol will also complete the integration with a custody provider during this release cycle.
• Tag v0.7.6 with Rust node was cut on 8 Feb 2021 and deployed on Delta testnet.

Delta Testnet

• Delta Testnet resumed on Feb 8th. Current status for DELTA-10 with over 300 Validators.
• We’re noticing lots of activity on the auction contract.

Current Focus

Performance, hardening, and production engineering work. These are optimization to make the protocol more performant and robust.

Highway

• We are working on “emergency consensus social research”
• Pass the round success meter between eras.
• Slow down the consensus if the execution engine is lagging.

Node - Rust

• We are working on “emergency consensus social research”, If there is a need to restart the protocol, the validators can come to a consensus on what the last safe block is and resume from that point forward.
• We’re designing a mechanism to store the protocol state on disk and implement a global state upgrade file.
• Prototype joiner. This is a new, fast synchronization mechanism so we'll be providing shortly after launch a ‘fast sync’ so you don't have to necessarily start from the genesis block to synchronize with the network. Participants will be able to ask a node for its global state or set of nodes for its global state and receive a download from those nodes of their global state so you don't have to replay the entire blockchain from genesis and this will enable us to prune away the global state.

Test and SRE

• Supporting testnet.
• Create MainNet, TestNet, DevNet accounts on AWS.
• NCTL & STESTS support & extensions

Ecosystem

• The team is working on enhancing the Javascript SDK. This is essential for our integration with our custody provider and we hope we finish this work this month.
• We’re doing some work on the DSL to make it more friendly to use.
• We’re doing a demo for the Casper signer. We need to do some enhancements to provide for hardware wallet integration and other websites that want to use the Casper signer.
• Casper course slides and recordings. We’re working on creating more contents and courses with the core idea is to come up with a course material that can lead to certification to be a dApp developer on Casper

Economics Research

• Sanity checking incentives distribution.
• Analysis of node-splitting incentives with the auction model.

Contract Runtime

• Alternative bids storage scheme.
• Working on automatic staking of Seignorage rewards.
• Support for delegate tokens at Genesis. New accounts.toml format is coming.

Launch!

• We will begin the process of creating the Genesis block!
• Genesis validator set is being put together
• Creating the starting balances, participants will have the opportunity to approve.
• Release candidate planned for March 8th.
• The trial run is planned for March 9th.

Team and Company

Welcome new team member: Taylor Acree, Third Level Support Engineer.

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