Hosted by Joe Benso – Director of Communications for the Casper Association, the most recent Casper community call took place on our Discord channel on November 29th, 2022. Casper Association Board Member Ralf Kubli, CasperLabs CTO Medha Parlikar, and Program Director Piotr Dziubecki have joined Joe. Alizee Carli, Director of Ecosystem, has also made her first appearance in the community calls.
This article is intended for those who missed the call to provide them with the latest updates on Casper and share some insights.
You can access recordings of all past calls in our Discord under the call archive section.
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So far, Casper Association has re-delegated a sizable portion of its treasury in line with the principles we laid out earlier this year. Accordingly, Casper Association reviews the performance and the size of the stakes of nodes, and establishes a list of validator nodes eligible for staking. Validators are picked randomly as possible.
Ralf Kubli has explained that the Association appreciates our community pointing out when we pick inactive validators, which has happened due to one of the picked validators who did not upgrade to 1.4.9 yet. We replaced that inactive validator and will reallocate Association tokens after 90 days.
Ralf Kubli once more emphasized that Casper was not exposed to FTX collapse with respect to assets or in any other way.
“We recently released version 1.4.9, which was a security fix,” said Medha before providing us with the 1.5 developments. “1.4.9 update went live without prior notice, but our community can observe the changes as they have been merged back to master,” she added.
The reason 1.5 was delayed is we had to perform a significant refactor of the reactor model. The delay was primarily due to multiple reactors being built in the architecture that didn't work. We collapsed all these reactors into a single reactor architecture which gives a significant uplift as this new model streamlines and simplifies the architecture of the system.
The new reactor model was originally slated for the 2.0 release, but we will be able to reap the benefits of a simple reactor model earlier as we did the work for the 1.5 release already.
Medha also announced that 1.5 is in test now, and we want to ship it before Christmas.
The 1.5 release will entail a set of improvements aside from the new reactor model that will make the Casper blockchain more robust and faster.
Held in Berlin on November 23rd and 24th, 2022, Next Block Expo (NBX) Berlin allowed us to get together with developers, visionaries, and entrepreneurs worldwide.
“NBX was a great success to us in terms of the feedback we got from the blockchain community. We met old friends, some projects that had already started building on Casper, and new projects asking about the possibilities. These projects range from gaming to NFTs and DeFi and real-world use cases.” said Piotr Dziubecki, Program Director.
Here you can find all the highlights from NBX Berlin.
“We already started working on the Developer Portal. So, this is now in our planning and design sessions, and the implementation work will start soon.The Portal will be a great environment that will collate all the information we currently have in our ecosystem and prepare a good venue for developers and users. It will allow us to show how easy it is to onboard and start building on Casper.” said Piotr regarding Casper Developer Portal.
We are also finishing and finalizing the new iteration of our Casper Ecosystem Explorer. So, be prepared soon as you will be able to see a revised list of projects with more features.
On top of that, we will be preparing reports and snapshots on what we did, ensuring that our community can see how a stake is being distributed and where and how often we delegate. We are finalizing the last sneak peeks in terms of testing on the Membership Portal, to make sure that we deliver a top notch solution.
For those unfamiliar with the Membership Portal, it will help to make the Casper Network more transparent and trustworthy, while members will have access to an assortment of different privileges and rewards.
Announced by Alizée Carli, Ecosystem Director of the Casper Association, on the opening day of NBX, Casper’s new $25 million Accelerate Grant Program has received over 50 applications since the announcement in Berlin.
Designed exclusively to encourage projects and startups building on Casper public mainnet, a wide variety of projects falls into the scope of this grant program.
“We are looking to support infrastructure projects that make it easier to build on Casper. These can be developer tools and SDKs that are going to make Casper more developer-friendly, especially for gaming and DeFi. The goal of increasing utility and lowering barriers of entry for users to interact with Casper is the reason we are supporting such projects.” explained Alizée.
Sustainability projects like voluntary carbon markets can also apply for this grant, as sustainability is a key focus for Casper.
You can learn more about the Accelerate Grant Program by reading this dedicated blog post.
Grant Program application page
The DEVxDAO aims at supporting large, multi-chain, at-scale initiatives that are not exclusively on Casper, whilst the Casper Accelerate Grant Program is intended for targeted, early-stage, Casper exclusive projects supporting in key priority areas in the development of the Casper ecosystem.
The Casper Accelerate Grant Program will focus on core DeFi and NFT platforms, software primitives for use in building composable applications, public infrastructure, identity and privacy.
At the end of the community call, Joe Benso announced that there will be a change to the cadence of the community calls, and Casper will add an additional format for a much broader ecosystem community call.
“From this point onward, we will maintain this call in Discord, but do monthly calls instead of a two-week cadence and l focus more on the technical updates on these calls. We will share more information on the new community call format soon, which will include more updates around community projects and developments on a more general level.” Joe has also shared that there will be a pause to community calls until the new format is settled and that expects this to happen in the new year.
That was all for this call. Be sure to join the next community call and join our ever-growing community!
