Casper Association Membership Portal

As you might have heard, the Casper Association is working on a Membership Portal which will help to make the Casper Network more transparent and trustworthy, while members will have access to an assortment of different privileges and rewards.

Any validator on the Casper Network can become a Member of the Casper Association and once a member, validators can participate in votes and the governance of the Casper Association. For node operators, the Casper Association Portal is the premier tool for gathering insights and visualizing the performance of your node.

The Membership Portal is in the final stages and after the last validator definitions are cleared, we will share an update within our community - stay tuned.

Casper 1.5

As previously mentioned, our core layer 1 team is working hard to release the 1.5 update as soon as possible. However, co-founder and CTO of CasperLabs, Medha Parlikar has announced that the update experienced a slight delay due to architectural issues in the code. The good news however is, that this comes along with a tremendous simplification of the architecture of the node. Again, Medha Parlikar ensured that this will be on testnet very soon while making sure the 1.5 release will significantly improve important metrics such as uptime, performance, and stability.

Stay tuned for the latest developments in the 1.5 release as we will share the details soon.

The new Casper Network website is live

We have been working on a new online hub during the previous month and are happy to announce that it finally went online on Casper Network.

Have a look and learn more about Casper, the Association and read the latest news.

A new generation of Casper Signer

A new generation of the Casper Signer is around the corner. We cannot share many details at the moment, but be ready for several features updates such as:

• Multi-platform
• Multi-browser
• On-chain wallet

Events and Hackathon Review

Casper was the official blockchain partner of the Cryptoverse Expo in Warsaw on September 9th. We’ve partnered with the event for the second year in a row now and were present with a team on-site to engage partners to fuel our business development pipeline and capture content you already start and will still see appearing on social media.

From September 16th to September 18th the Casper Association was also partnering with SBHACK, which in turn partnered with HackZurich, bringing Blockchain & Web3 to Europe's largest and most prestigious hackathon.

With approximately 1300 hackers, HackZurich is one of Europe's largest hackathons, where this year participants coded for more than 40 hours, submitting 140+ concepts across 20 challenges. See a few impressions from the event teams here.

After the Casper Association hosted two training sessions and provided on-site and online support, we were happy that overall 9 projects leveraged Casper Blockchain (≈ 20 hackers), of which 2 (Axper and Flidless) made it to the top 25 (finalists), while Quasar won the workshop prize.

We are looking forward to upcoming hackathons and future projects built on Casper.

For more information on upcoming hackathons and to ask your questions to our developers, you can join our Discord and use the Ask a Casper Dev channel.

This section is dedicated to answering questions coming from our community. Join Medha Parlikar and Ralf Kubli who provided answers to some of the frequently asked questions.

To ask your questions to our team, join our biweekly community calls that take place on our Discord.

The questions and answers below have been edited for clarity and consistency.  Listen to the full feedback from Casper in the audio linked in the community call archive section on the Casper Discord channel.

Currently, it is quite hard to understand how the DEVxDAO works, who is in charge of decision-making for grants as far as how the committee is elected, and which are the rationales for deciding who receives a grant. It is also not clear to me how Casper Association and DEVxDAO are correlated.

The DEVxDAO is an independent grant-giving organization. Information on the DAO is transparent on the DAO portal. In addition, the DAO is running Q&A sessions and has several social media channels in place where you can find out much more information on how they operate, how they provide grants, etc.

The upcoming Update of Casper 2.0 with the new Consensus "ZUG" is the highlight everyone is looking at and waiting for. Could you give us some insights as to what are the major differences to the current consensus and what are the "unique selling points" comparing it to other existing Layer 1 blockchains?

The new protocol named ZUG is a novel Consensus protocol, which was presented during Discotec 2022 and initial feedback was that the protocol is unique.

For those who are eager to know, it is already published in the archive.

The basic difference between Highway and ZUG is the less overhead and increased efficiency. The ZUG Consensus allows a proto block read for finalization before the current block is finalized, which enables a pipeline architecture that makes it very efficient. With this, validators could theoretically process multiple blocks at the same time.

What is the future of Casper and the Hyperledger Foundation?

CasperLabs has joined the Hyperledger Foundation as a member which gives Casper Labs access to several things such as Co-Marketing activities within their business development pipeline. Moreover, Casper will become a contributor to Hyperledger projects. The Hyperledger Foundation is an open global ecosystem for enterprise grade blockchain technologies. Casper is committed to advancing the mission to collaborate in the development of trusted systems and open standards.

With that being said, at an event, Casper demoed a Casper bridge with Hyperledger which could become interesting for banks due to the hybrid network solution and there are a number of developments on Casper that will position Casper prominently within the financial sector.

Be sure to join the next community call!