Ralf Kubli discussed the priorities of the Casper Association: supporting the creator economy, authenticity and ownership, and financial applications. He elaborated on the efforts in each area.

1. Creator Economy

Ralf emphasized the Casper Association’s dedication to the creator economy, particularly through infrastructure development for creators using NFTs. Designed to offer superior experiences for deploying contracts that align with the unique business models and primitives of creators, the focus in this area is mainly on reinforcing Casper’s commitment to supporting innovation in the digital creative space.

2. Authenticity and Ownership

Highlighting the importance of authenticity and ownership, Ralf noted the Casper Association’s efforts to enable cryptographic proofs of ownership. Through this functionality, users can securely verify and transfer ownership, enhancing the trustworthiness and security within the Casper ecosystem.

3. Finance

“The Casper Association's commitment to revolutionizing the financial sector through the integration of the ACTUS standard on Casper is a strategic move aimed at supporting a wide array of financial operations, exploring Casper's potential to create significant impacts within the financial industry. The adoption of the ACTUS standard underlines the Casper Association’s dedication to enhancing financial inclusivity and efficiency through blockchain technology,” said Ralf.

Improving the developer experience is another key objective, particularly in light of upcoming releases, according to Ralf. He also stressed the importance of ensuring that new features and Casper’s enhanced capabilities are well-documented and easily accessible. He then turned his focus on the growth of the Casper ecosystem, including the recent listings by notable exchanges like ByBit and Bit2Me and the successful integration with Alchemy Pay. “These steps are part of a strategic approach to expand access to Casper,” said Ralf.

“The systematic exploration of DeFi is underway, with the Casper Association considering the integration of new primitives and assessing the potential impact of upcoming releases like Condor. The cautious approach is to ensure Casper’s stability and foster growth, with anticipation of increased activities and engagement from the user community once stability is achieved.”

Medha Parlikar shared her enthusiasm for the upcoming Condor upgrade, detailing its importance and the features it brings.

“The core team is finalizing the integration net for Condor, different from the public testnet, to kickstart the developer preview,” explained Medha. “Updating documentation concurrently with code development is important to ensure that changes are thoroughly documented,” she added.

Medha emphasized the comprehensive documentation efforts that accompany the code development for Condor.

“All the changes are already there on the GitHub repository and you can learn about that in the concepts, and the changes to smart contracts, all documented. Please feel free to start exploring so you can start wrapping your head around how Condor is going to work,” she said.

The Condor upgrade introduces a complete overhaul to the gas model on Casper, where the cost of gas for transactions is effectively reduced to zero. “What's really cool about Condor is that gas will be fully refunded, making the net cost of transactions zero, and will enable users to just hold cspr in their wallet and reuse it over and over again for transactions.

“As the network gets filled up with real work, costs for transactions will go up so the amount of cspr you will have to lock will increase. cspr will still be needed, but it will be refunded to those wallets. People can use their cspr over and over and over again rather than cycling it through validators and exchanges,” Medha explained.

With Condor, dApps on Casper will possess a main purse, allowing contracts to self-fund transactions. This feature eliminates the need for users to have cspr to interact with contracts. Users can engage with web3 infrastructure without the prerequisite of holding cspr, broadening the accessibility of dApps on Casper. The change is expected to increase transaction volume and utility for on-chain contracts, despite potentially reducing the number of wallet holders.

“Legitimate work can happen without your users needing cspr to invoke your contract. We are excited about this, we feel it's going to open up a whole brave world for your end users to get access to Web3 infrastructure, and to the benefits of Web3 through dApps, without needing to hold cspr on their wallets,” she explained to builders.

Post-Condor, the focus will shift to improving the virtual machine (VM) according to Medha. “Work on a new, more efficient VM began over six months ago, aiming for a cleaner, faster, and easier-to-use WebAssembly runtime,” Medha said. The new VM might be introduced as early as in a 2.1 release, she announced. The new VM is part of a broader initiative to enhance network throughput, with a transition period for contract authors to migrate to the improved VM.

Additionally, Casper will support two consensus protocols post-Condor, maintaining its modularity with the existing Highway protocol and introducing Zug. This flexibility allows networks to alternate between or choose a specific consensus protocol.

Medha also touched on the Juliet release, focusing on enhancements to the networking layer. Juliet upgrade introduces native backpressure management, aiming to streamline system performance and security. The networking layer will automatically handle backpressuring, a response to previous challenges like the inscription storm. Additionally, Juliet contributes to the open-source community by offering a Rust native networking crate which is designed to be secure and efficient against denial-of-service attacks.

“Expected to be released before Condor, Juliet upgrade is nearing its final stages, with the team completing the last of the release candidate testing. Only one issue remains before moving to integration testing and then to the testnet. The testnet participants are expected to conduct networking and performance testing as part of the validators' acceptance process for the upgrade,” Medha said.

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