CasperLabs Weekly Update: Jan. 5, 2021

Update Summary

Mainnet is planned to launch in Q1 2021. We plan to have two developer releases for January and February before the mainnet launch. Our focus over the next two months is to have upgrades, hardening, and performance enhancements. We also have big announcements coming up on our custody solutions and some key strategic deals/partnerships we’ve secured.

Check out this presentation from CasperLabs’ co-founder and CTO Medha Parlikar on “How Casper governance and staking economy is designed.”

Execution

• The team has started the fifth weekly sprint of the 21.01 release cycle (Sprint 9.5). There was an extra sprint because of the holidays.
• Release 21.01 marks the first production version (Mainnet Release Candidate) of the Casper protocol. This release focuses on the networking layer, hardening, and bug fixes.

Delta Testnet Performance

• Tag v0.4.0 with Rust node was cut on 30 December 2020 and deployed on Delta testnet.
• The testnet is currently down because we discovered a problem with the gossiper which took down 1/3rd of the network and stalled consensus.
• The team is working on getting a fix-up wherein the validator will join from the era from which they left off.

Current Focus

Highway

• Design: disabling bids on liveness failures.

Node — Rust

• Replace the gossiper component with the libp2p gossiping.
• Make BlockValidator validate blocks in the same manner as BlockProposer.
• PutDeploy RPC endpoint should return an error if the Deploy is invalid.
• Discard finality signatures by unknown validators.

Test and SRE

• [stest] — Get stest working and run test suite on Test Release Network.
• Create clarity/event_store server for the release-test network.
• NCTL & STESTS support & extensions.

Ecosystem

• We’re making a new tutorial video for multi-sig & key management.
• We’re also making an example video on how contract upgrades work.

Economics Research

• We’re harmonizing the consensus paper and economics paper.

Contract Runtime

• Apply costs to all host side system contracts. This means WASMless transfer will not be free.

Team & Company Update

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.

Want to get started?

At release, links to installation packages and relevant documentation are available on GitHub.

• Packages available on GitHub
• DApp Developer Guide

Where can bugs be filed?

Report a bug on GitHub