CasperLabs Weekly Update: Dec. 15, 2020

Update Summary

We’re excited to inform our community that the Highway Protocol paper is now complete. We will be putting out a press release soon and explore the potential to publish the paper in a journal.

Current Focus

• We’re implementing detection of Doppelgangers.
• Adding unit tests for creating LNC-complaint units
• Disabling bids on liveness failures. We’re designing a method to disable bids from nodes that experienced liveness failure during the previous era. This means that nodes that experienced a failure during a given era will not be eligible to place a bid for the next era. This is to help prevent liveness failures on the network.

Engineering Status

• The team has started the second weekly sprint of the 21.01 release cycle (Sprint 9.2). Release 21.01 marks the first production version (Mainnet Release Candidate) of the Casper protocol.
• This release will improve networking by providing a robust node discovery and gossiping protocol to support message passing and node discovery for the Casper network.

Delta Testnet

• We encountered an issue with the Delta testnet and have restarted the network with a few validators to make sure it’s stable before opening it up to more validators.
• We’ve had some challenges with having CLarity working on the Rust node and we want to ensure that CLarity is working properly before opening it up.

Node - Rust

• We’re removing account hashes from the node discovery service, as it creates confusion for node runners. We will now represent accounts internally using the public key with the two leading characters of the public key representing the encryption scheme. For example, if the key starts with “01”, it's an ED25519 key, “02” an SEC-P256K1 (Ethereum/Bitcoin type key), etc. We also plan on supporting SEC_P256R1 keys post mainnet.
• Implement network discovery via Kademlia.
• Discovery: Merkle proof key enumeration prototype.

Test/SRE

• Working on updating the log-rotate file for Casper-node to correctly manage size despite debug logs. We had run into an issue where a disk filled up space because of debugging logs.

Ecosystem

• We’re finishing the JavaScript SDK and seeding it with new keys.

Economics Research

• Improving the gas spot market specification.
• We plan on tokenizing block spaces post mainnet launch. We want to enable businesses and enterprises to secure space on future blocks at a stable and predictable price.

Tune in for our community calls in the future by joining the CasperLabs Discord and staying up to date with ecosystem events.