2020.12.22

Engineering Status

• Status reports are delivered weekly at 9:00 AM PT (16:00 UTC, Sydney +11, Beijing +8, Greece +3, Amsterdam +2, Onitsha +1, New York -4, Seattle -7)
  https://casperlabs.zoom.us/j/488766416 and live streamed.
• This update is available on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/dnSX7cel8N8
• Prior updates are available at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8oWxbJ-csEpezWe5KccTtOm-ZuzJP70O

Execution

• Team has started third weekly sprint of 21.01 release cycle (Sprint 9.3). 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. The protocol will also complete the integration with a custody provider during this release cycle.

Release

• Tag v0.3.1 with Rust node was cut on 21 December 2020 and deployed on Delta testnet.

Delta Testnet Performance

• Delta Testnet is up with 4 Validators. Current block height: 1404, Era Id: 50, .
• We are targeting to open and add more validators starting Wednesday.

Delta Testnet

A Rust network (code name Delta) with 3 validators was launched on Tuesday, 15 December 2020 with following features.

• Rust based
• Supports Eras, configurable round exponent and other Highway parameters
• Support bonding/unbonding, slashing, rewards
• Genesis process
• All smart contracting features
• Testnet Explorer

Current Focus

Highway

• Implementation of Finality Signatures.
• Design: disabling bids on liveness failures.
• Design: Crash recovery as part of hardening.
• Paper is finished! Plan is to submit to arxiv.org & start peer review process.

Node - Rust

• Update libp2p gossip and direct-message behavior..
• Discovery: Account hashes removal.
• Implement network discovery via Kademlia.
• Discovery: Merkle proof key enumeration prototype.
• Fix event size and potentially re-introduce compile time enforced upper limit.
• Check account when submitting Deploys.
• PutDeploy RPC endpoint should return an error if the Deploy is invalid.

Test and SRE

• Enable RDS Performance Insights for event-store.
• STests: Extend workload generators.
• Create Python scripts for EC2 provisioning.
• Improving CI/CD - Add crates.io publish to tag pipeline.

Ecosystem

• JavaScript SDK.
• Clarity and Event Store.
• Cypress Tests

Economics Research

• Improve gas spot market specification.
• Create auction CEPs.

Contract Runtime

• Remove panics and expects where possible.

• The zoom meeting id is https://casperlabs.zoom.us/j/924713678.

Governance Status

• We have adopted a Casper Enhancement Proposal (CEP) process to vet and accept important features and changes. Details of the process can be found here https://github.com/CasperLabs/ceps.
• Meetings are Tuesday mornings @ 9 am PT.
• Meetings are available on YouTube.
• Zoom Link: https://casperlabs.zoom.us/j/488766416 & live streamed on YouTube.
• Governance research Repository