2020.11.17

Engineering Status

• Status reports are delivered weekly at 9:00 AM PT (16:00 UTC, Sydney +11, Beijing +8, Greece +3, Amsterdam +2, Onitsha +1, New York -4, Seattle -7)
  https://casperlabs.zoom.us/j/488766416 and live streamed.
• This update is available on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/dnSX7cel8N8
• Prior updates are available at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8oWxbJ-csEpezWe5KccTtOm-ZuzJP70O

Execution

• Team has started third weekly sprint of 20.12 release cycle (Sprint 8.3). Release 20.12 delivers prioritized bug fixes, networking improvements and more consensus protocol security features. The network will support up to 100 validator slots in the bonding auction. Validators can bid for open slots by using the bidding API.

Release

• Tag v0.1.6 with Rust node was cut on Wednesday, 4 November 2020 and deployed on Delta testnet.

Delta Testnet

A Rust network (code name Delta) with 4 validators was launched on Thursday, 05 November 2020 with following features.

• Rust based
• Supports Eras, configurable round exponent and other Highway parameters
• Support bonding/unbonding, slashing, rewards
• Genesis process
• All smart contracting features
• Testnet Explorer

Delta Testnet Performance

• Currently 50 validators are active.
• Height: 5698, Era: 437.

Beta Testnet

• This network has been de-commissioned on Monday, November 16th.

Current Focus

Highway

• Supporting security audit.
• Validate an incoming vote for correctness with LNC.
• Validate endorsements against equivocations.
• Consensus: Design Disconnect from nodes sending invalid messages

Node - Rust

• Improve libp2p network component implementation.
• Improvements in testing: convert existing tests to reactor macro.
• Add json rpc endpoint that returns endpoint documentation.
• Don't rely on event order in deploy buffer; fix block handling.

Test and SRE

• Network Tolerance Monitoring: Dos Attacks, Network partitions.
• CI/CD for Clarity.
• STests: Update monitoring, extend workload generators.

Ecosystem

• Clarity and Signer: launch new release.
• JavaScript SDK.
• Documentation updates.

Economics Research

• Block proposer: Design initial gas pricing model.

Contract Runtime

• Add memo/destination field to transfer.
• Reduce total supply on slashing.

Team & Company Update

• New member in SRE team: Rob Jennings.
• We have new timings for our weekly workshops, held twice a week on:

1. Thursday 07:00 am Pacific time and
2. Thursday 11:00 pm Pacific (4pm Japan Time).

• The zoom meeting id is https://casperlabs.zoom.us/j/924713678.

Governance Status

• We have adopted a Casper Enhancement Proposal (CEP) process to vet and accept important features and changes. Details of the process can be found here https://github.com/CasperLabs/ceps.
• Meetings are Tuesday mornings @ 9 am PT.
• Meetings are available on YouTube.
• Zoom Link: https://casperlabs.zoom.us/j/488766416 & live streamed on YouTube.
• Governance research Repository