Joe Benso:

Welcome once again to the Casper Podcast, where we take a deep dive into blockchain technology and speak with those who are building the future of the decentralized web. I'm your host, Joe Benso, and as usual, I'm joined by my colleague, Matt Schaffnit from the Casper Association. Thanks again for joining me today, Matt.

Matt Schaffnit:

It's going to be a powerful 10 minutes.

Joe Benso:

So Matt, today I'm excited. We have Medha Parlikar. Everyone from the Casper ecosystem knows who she is, obviously the CTO of Casper Labs. It's always great to talk with her, just to get her insights.

Matt Schaffnit:

I'm really looking forward to speaking with Medha today. She and I haven't had the opportunity to catch up since we were in Paris together for Paris Blockchain Week, it's going to be awesome to hear what she has in store for our listeners relative to version 1.5., as well as bringing color into some of the perspectives that enterprises have relative to blockchain.

Joe Benso:

Medha Parlikar, thank you so much for joining us today on the Casper Podcast. You are the CTO of Casper Labs and just to clarify for our audience, how would you describe your role as a CTO and as blockchain evolves and what does it mean for you, day to day at Casper Labs. ?

Medha Parlikar:

Oh yeah, it's definitely evolving for me. If you think about being a Chief Technical Officer in the blockchain space, you'll see a wide variety of profiles and a lot of different types of personalities in the CTO space, or if you want to call them lead architects or visionaries.

They do have personalities, for sure. Some of them are very much researchers, PhDs, mathematicians. They focus a lot on the consensus mechanism. That's their area of focus and expertise. I would say for me, I was never that type of persona. I was never that type of personality, and today I still am not. While I do have a lot of exposure to consensus mechanisms and I understand their purpose and the problems that they solve, I'm a much more product-focused CTO. I've always been. My focus has always been on what kind of value can we deliver to the customer so that it solves a business problem and when we came up with the feature set for the Casper protocol, we started with that very foundational belief that there needed to be a public blockchain or technology that's purpose-built for the enterprise and what that means is that the protocol gives you certain guarantees. It enforces certain things that are separate from what you can build in the smart contract container or the smart contract layer on the blockchain.

There are certain things that the Casper protocol does natively that we feel are extremely important because it gives additional transparency and guarantees to the users of the Casper technology. This is what the protocol is enforcing. These are the security guarantees the protocol is giving you about accounts over contract versioning. We feel that that is very essential. Again, that comes from a real product focus. Coming from enterprise software engineering where I had to build products for enterprises. I know what kind of technology it takes to run in that data center, and what the requirements are to build a product around a blockchain.

Joe Benso:

Amazing. Tons of nuances that I think people don't quite have deep insights into and it's great to hear how you're approaching that role at Casper Labs, and as you're building out the protocol itself. I mean, blockchain technology is evolving constantly. Where do you see the evolution of blockchain over the next five years, and how does that fit into the milestones at Casper?

Medha Parlikar:

When we started Casper Labs and set out to build the Casper technology no one was really thinking about the enterprise. Everybody in the space was really looking at disrupting the status quo, decentralizing everything, and now people are coming around to realize that the broad adoption of any technology requires the enterprise to lead the charge.

And even those startups that are disruptive at that time ultimately become those large companies that enable access of the technology to the masses. I believe that consensus protocols will ultimately become commoditized. There will be a few high-performing consensus protocols that the majority of the blockchains will use once they've stood the test of time.

The Casper technology has pluggable consensus. It's the only protocol that actually has two consensus protocols implemented in it and is accessible to operate within it. So you can run Casper today either using Highway Consensus or Zug Consensus. Both of them are novel protocols and they're both PBFT Casper variants, but they are both available.

You can run Casper in either format. Zug is slated to be part of 2.0., that's when we recommend that Casper mainnet would switch over to Zug consensus from Highway consensus, but Highway consensus isn't going anywhere. And if the validators decide they want to revert back to Highway consensus, they can choose to do that.

And the reason for that is because I believe that consensus protocols will ultimately become commoditized. Fast forward 10 or 15 years from now, I don't believe you're going to see a whole bunch of different consensus protocols in the market. Consensus protocols are not valuable to the end user. Nobody cares about consensus.

There's a lot of focus on it in the blockchain space because it's academically intriguing and interesting and it's an area of research and you see a lot of researchers in the blockchain space. But if you ask any enterprise person, they don't care about consensus.

Matt Schaffnit:

No, I think these are excellent points, Medha. Casper's focused on the enterprise, and that means that we're building robust technology that can scale. One thing that I want to bring up before we go into version 1.5. is regulation and regulatory clarity. I've always been on the side of just complying and pushing for that clarity. It's one of the reasons, obviously, we're domiciled in Switzerland, because the country provides that clarity.

How do you think that's affecting your job as a CTO and as a founder running a blockchain startup in the ecosystem today?

Medha Parlikar:

So we are working with enterprises and enterprises are regulated. All enterprises, irrespective of their size, are subject to compliance oversight. And when you think about the regulatory uncertainty that's in the space today, what it does is it makes enterprises afraid to adopt the technology.

So what does the public protocol bring that a private blockchain doesn't bring? Well, it brings an additional layer of security, and we'll talk about this more later, but the public blockchain environment is literally a hostile environment. Anyone can send any kind of transaction to that network. When you look at why is Ethereum so trusted. Ethereum is so trusted because it has withstood that very harsh environment over time. This is why enterprises feel that this open-source infrastructure is so important. But really, it's been pressure tested, it's been battle tested.

Matt Schaffnit:

Well, great. I think this is a wonderful juncture to dive into something that's top of everyone's mind, and that's version 1.5. I think our listeners are very curious what your perspective is on some of the features, particularly maybe the top five features that you might have in mind that are coming out in the pipeline.

Medha Parlikar:

So 1.5. is an extremely exciting release. When you think about the top features, there's a lot in 1. 5. What comes top of mind, obviously, is the fasting capability, right? So nodes can join in a decentralized way very quickly, as low as the bar to entry. The next one that the community has been waiting for a long time for is redelegate and so this allows you to, in a single transaction, send your stake from one validating node to another validating node.

So this is really important from a community perspective. They don't have to come back to send another transaction after waiting for the bonding period. So redelegate is a really cool feature.

We have this speculative execution endpoint, and a lot of people are calling this the gas cost estimation feature, but it is so, so much more than that. The speculative execution endpoint allows you to actually debug contracts against mainnet. So you can run your contracts against mainnet and not actually commit the changes. And you can look and see what happens in that speculative execution. And one of the things you can look at is the gas cost. But you can do so, so much more.

You can take advantage of the composability of contracts on chain. If one of the contracts you've been using has been upgraded you can actually debug your contracts against that newly upgraded version of a contract. So it really helps composability on chain and allows you to debug in real time. The next feature after that is we've got this role-based security that leverages the Casper multi-signature and the Casper account.

So what this means in contract, I can actually specify roles and have the contract perform different actions depending on which accounts have signed a transaction. And so this came from feedback from IPwe and as we've said, we listen to our community and that includes enterprises as well as open source developers and IPwe came back to us and said, “we have workflows where we need to provide different in-contract capabilities, for paralegals versus lawyers,” and so we saw the value in providing in-contract capability to offer role-based actions in contracts so this capability is coming out with 1.5., something that we're super excited about.

Additionally, this is not a customer-facing feature, but it is very exciting for us. We did a huge architectural rework of 1.5. that was slated as part of the 2.0. release. And this is where a chunk of our time actually went into 1.5. was to actually implement the new single reactor architecture. In the node for Casper, and this is a 2.0. feature that is actually being released ahead of the 2.0. timeline. We felt that it was essential 1. 5 really needed the three architectures, so we went ahead and implemented it.  So this is a big thing forward facing for 2.0..

Other things that I'm excited about 1.5., it is going to unlock the ability for us to shorten the block time. We're going to be shortening the block times after 1. 5 is settled in mainnet. We're going to half the block times down from 32 seconds to 16 seconds. And this is something that the community has definitely been clamoring for. We've been listening. We've heard what you've been asking for and with the fast joiners now as part of 1.5., we'll be able to make those shorter block times a reality.

And lastly,  our ability to clone mainnet. is a reality in 1.5.. So one of the features that we can use for testing is you can actually grab a mainnet clone. You can take a node, you can synchronize them to mainnet, and then you can go through the emergency upgrade feature in a private network and actually run a mainnet clone in a private network with a different network name using a different validator set.

So this is something we've used in our testing extensively. But again, It's a capability that will allow those businesses that are really serious about using Casper to actually test against production. I can't tell you the number of times, even in a cloud-based system, that you're not able to test against your production databases.

This is a hard thing to do. And one of the capabilities of blockchain that really sets it apart from oracle or Postgres or any of these other database systems is to be able to rapidly synchronize. your state. And so one of the reasons the 1.5. capability is really important to enterprise is you need this. You need robustness in your core infrastructure and being able to rapidly spin up a system in a new cloud provider or a new geographical redundant zone is massively important. And this is native to blockchains. Whereas you're paying. An arm and a leg to have hot, hot database backup capability with Oracle or any of these, uh, enterprise relational database management systems. This is something that's based in the blockchain. So it's very, very exciting. Super stoked about what 1.5. will bring in.

Matt Schaffnit:

Joe, that was an awesome chat.

Joe Benso:

Always great speaking with Medha. She just knows the inside and out of blockchain technical challenges. Casper, obviously. And so just a wealth of knowledge.

Matt Schaffnit:

For me, I love her pragmatism, you know, as a person who comes out of corporate as well. There's a certain level of comfort that she brings to a guy like me. When she explains the way they're engaging with enterprises or the thought process, the big picture or what have you in version 1.5., just continuous improvement.

Joe Benso:

Well, that's it. We're pretty much out of time. Sadly, we've got to jet, but if you'd like to be on the Casper podcast, send us a message. We'd love to hear what you're building and what you're working on from myself and Matt at the Casper Association. Keep building and we'll see you on the other side.