Hosted by Joe Benso – Director of Communications for the Casper Association, the most recent Casper community call took place on our Discord channel on October 18th, 2022.
We prepared this article for those who missed the call to provide you with the latest updates on Casper and share some insights.
These calls are being recorded, and you’ll be able to find an archive of past calls in our Discord under our call archive section.
The Casper Association has also recently launched a bi-monthly newsletter you can sign up for on the revamped Casper Network website to stay up to date as well.
As previously announced, 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.
Ralf provided us with the latest updates on the Membership Portal:
We recognize the anticipation for the Membership Portal to go live. Still, we have a bit of a challenge in defining what a validator is at the time of a vote, in the process, and the governance of the Association. We need to work through that and then continue to beta-test. There is a few weeks long work there until we can roll out another beta version with this kind of functionality that we believe is necessary to have the proper governance in place.
The Casper Association has started building more structure around its ecosystem development group. We are much more available to the community to talk about what it means to build on Casper and also speak to projects that would like to build on Casper and come to us with their ideas and projects. We plan on having more infrastructure available to the community to register their interest and make sure that we speak to them in person.
We are very invested in NFTs, and we think of NFTs as much broader definitions of property rights, and we call them cryptographically secure property rights. We are very excited about the new wallet infrastructure, which, hopefully, we will talk about very soon. And also, the ancillary services that will be offered in a decentralized environment to the community will be awe-inspiring. We are pretty excited about that.
“The engineering team is working furiously on 1.5”, said Medha Parlikar regarding the release of Casper 1.5.
The first round of tests successfully joined a network using the faster joiner, the new fast joiner model. The delay was primarily due to multiple reactors being built in the architecture that didn't work. And we were seeing a lot of highs and bugs cropping up as a result of that.
A deep and significant refactor of the 1.5 base was done, which resulted in a much cleaner architecture, a single reactor, which is a part of the refactor that we want to do in 2.0, so we didn’t just focus on 1.5, but went into a little deeper and did some of the 2.0 architecture work that we wanted to get done.
It clears some of the tech debt and debris in the node as part of the 2.0 work. So, we feel really good about where 1.5 is. It is going into testing.
Medha said she would provide more updates in two weeks at the next community call about the testing status and how close we are to an RC. We're out of its core engineering now and officially entering the test.
We have not yet started implementing rewards in Zug. We have the basic consensus protocol done, we need to snap in rewards, but our team has been pulled into doing 1.5 work to land the 1.5 release. Once the team is done supporting 1.5, it will go back to 2.0 and focus on the rewards mechanism.
Zug is a novel consensus protocol we've published on the archive for those unfamiliar.
We are getting that paper peer-reviewed, and we're very excited because it's linear in its overhead, which means we can expand the validator set if the community is open to doing so without harming the network’s performance. We anticipate we will be able to reduce block times with the Zug consensus protocol, which has already been tested and has been doing really, really well.
We are working with IPwe around their token minting. They're in talks with the Casper Association and with Medha. The technical team is doing some performance testing for CEP-78, and additional work on gas fee stabilization for bulk minting or large quantities of NFTs. We are adding some features to CEP-78, to support that.
“DEVxDAO is a uniquely governed style of grant-giving operation that is there to support the Casper ecosystem.”– Timothy Messer
The DEVxDAO works off a governance system that we call the MVPR, and we've tried to do our best at open-sourcing all of the software we're using for that effort. But none of it has been on-chain yet. We are pleased to announce that a lot of the core infrastructure that we're using to do votes, all of that incredible stuff that we need to run a real DAO in a truly decentralized, open, and transparent way, are ready to be brought on-chain as their smart contracts are done and are currently on the testnet.
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.
We would like to announce when we have something worth announcing. What we can say, though, is that we do expect an announcement around Casper Punks very soon because we're working with partners on exciting stuff around Casper Punks. So, that should be out very soon.
NFTs gas stabilization is currently in engineering. We are getting ready to go into testing for it and to verify it works. You start to see gas issues when you have huge collections consisting of thousands of NFTs. So that's what we're currently working on. It's a feature for very large collections.
We are trying to allocate staking of the Association's treasury fairly randomly and not with a view to favoritism. We estimate every 90 to 120 days should provide a pretty fair distribution to all validators.
We were invited to participate here at the I.D.E.A.S by Coindesk event, an acronym for Next Generation Ideas. Casper Association and CasperLabs are jointly presenting. I will speak about what we think the future of finance will look like on blockchain, and Mrinal will talk about what will broadly drive the adoption of blockchain technologies.
Obviously, we cannot comment on price development. But the market has woken up to what Casper is and what Casper stands for.
Be sure to join the next community call!
