PolkaWar x Casper Labs AMA Recap
PART 1 — HOST QUESTIONS
Q1: Can you introduce about yourself ?
Medha | CTO Non-asker of coin
Yes of course — I would be happy to — I’m Medha Parlikar, the CTO and one of the Co-Founders of CasperLabs. CasperLabs is the company that developed the software that now powers the Casper Network. Before blockchain, I was an Engineering leader in large enterprise SaaS software companies — such as Adobe and Avalara. I’m very excited to be working in decentralized blockchain.
Q2: CasperLabs’s technology is powered by a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) CBC- Casper protocol, which once brought a huge discussion in the community. Can you briefly introduce and elaborate on this protocol?
Medha | CTO Non-asker of coin
Absolutely — I will do so in a few parts:
CBC Casper has a few essential features — 1. Partial synchrony 2. Variable fault tolerance 3. GHOST fork-choice rule 4. Safety (Finality) 5. Liveness (Highway Protocol). Specifically, Caper’s implementation of the protocol has additional features — such as execution after consensus, validator ejection, market for validator selection.
The Highway protocol does require a minimum 2/3rds quorum in order to finalize a block. Highway achieves liveness by pseudo random leader selection, rounds and eras. It achieves finality via a summit theorem. Daniel Kane is the primary author of the Highway Protocol.
There are other fork choice protocols, but most of these are not permissionless. This is because the liveness proofs for fork choice protocols are hard to formalize. The Highway protocol has liveness and safety proofs. There are many attack vectors that can be possible with fork choice protocols, both for liveness and safety. Highway’s summit theorem and leader selection model makes it resistant to attacks.
It is partially synchronous, which makes it resistant to attacks, because it is not possible to predict when messages will be sent by participants. Gasper — the Eth 2.0 Casper variant is not partially synchronous — and is vulnerable to a timing attack. Additionally, In mainnet, highway provides finality in 1 minute.
It is a member of the CBC Casper family of protocols. Casper is the first mainnet implementation of a CBC Casper consensus protocol. The validators launched mainnet on 3/31! The Association launched the token — CSPR on May 11th, after a very successful public token sale on CoinList.
Q3: Cross-chain is an inevitable technology trend of blockchain in the future. How is Casper and how is it technologically prepared to respond to this trend?
Medha | CTO Non-asker of coin
The Core team at CasperLabs is working on a Cosmos bridge as we speak — specifically using the IBC protocol. We believe that the IBC protocol is the best protocol for this. In order to implement the bridge, we need light clients. Light clients are planned for this year, early next year. We are also working on side chain shards for Casper.
Q4: While emerging blockchains like Fantom, ICP… have built their own Defi ecosystem, like they have their own DEX, they have their own AMM. So, has Casper built its own ecosystem and how is the process?
Medha | CTO Non-asker of coin
Yes — a DEX is going to be deployed to Casper shortly. The Casper Ecosystem is developing rapidly. The process to participate is to visit https://devxdao.com — this is the Developer DAO that administers grants to extend decentralization and the adoption of blockchain technology.
The Casper Association has granted the DevDAO 500 million CSPR to facilitate the development of the Casper Ecosystem. So far, grants for several SDK’s, block explorers, a document signing application (CasperSign), Validator monitoring tools, wallets and security reviews have already been approved.
Grants are proposed by the community and voted on by the community. Anyone can sign up to become an associate & participate. The voting system is reputation based. Those earning reputation have voting power.
Q5: PolkaWar is an NFT Gaming project that uses Ethereum and BSC’s ERC721 protocol to build. Does Casper have its own protocol like that for building the NFT platform? Can you be specific about it?
Medha | CTO Non-asker of coin
Yes of course!
Yes absolutely https://github.com/casper-network/ceps/blob/cep46_casper_nft_protocol/text/0047-casper-nft-protocol.md CEP47 specifies the NFT protocol on Casper. Additionally, we are working on a projects with many large NFT projects such as Terra Virtua with Casper.
See https://blog.casperlabs.io for the announcements. We have more exciting announcements coming out also! Casper is a turing complete protocol with smart contracts in Rust and AssemblyScript. We have added new features to the ERC721 and 1155 specifications — that allow authors to optimize for gas fees also.
Q6: Now we have a smart contract running on Ethereum. Does Casper support this smart contract migration running on Casper Network easily? What is the basic process?
Medha | CTO Non-asker of coin
Indeed it is! Casper has a prototype transpiler for Solidity to Rust. We recommend that smart contract authors use the Rust contracts API for Casper, so they can take advantage of Casper’s many smart contracting features, namely, running and testing of contracts locally in an IDE, Advanced account management and upgradeable contracts. Casper has many more features planned for the smart contracts engine.
Casper contracts can run and be tested without needing a node! So on Casper, you do not need to use something like Truffle or Ganache. This is very important developer UX feature — all non blockchain developers use IDE to build, run and test their code!!!
PART 2 — TWITTER QUESTIONS
Q1: What projects are currently building on Casper network ?
Medha | CTO Non-asker of coin
I shared a small snippet of the grants in the DevDAO interface, in addition to those, we have built CasperSign: https://blog.casperlabs.io/the-first-casper-native-dapp-is-here-caspersign-allows-users-to-sign-contracts-confidentially-securely/
There is also a DEX, Wallets, Ledger integration, cspr.live and many more. visit blog.casperlabs.io to see all of the projects that are building on Casper. If anyone wants to build please visit DevXDAO.com to get started.
Q2: As one of Ethereum’s competitors, how did Casper Network compete with Ethereum when Ethereum 2.0 is about to be launched in the near future ?
Medha | CTO Non-asker of coin
We do not have any intention of competing with Ethereum. While we do offer a prototype Solidity transpiler, our goal is to target enterprise adoption. Our features are very specific to what Enterprise needs in a blockchain.
We are part of the Eth community. We have members like Silur and Matt Doty (https://github.com/orgs/casper-network/people/xcthulhu) on our team
https://github.com/ethereum/ethash Matt is the author of Ethhash
https://github.com/ethereum/ethash/graphs/contributors Still #1 contributor to the Eth mining algorithm. So we are friends of Ethereum. If projects wish to take advantage of Casper’s performance and security, we will help all of them.
Q3: IPwe is a platform using technology and AI that could help bring value and make the transactional piece of IP easier. Can I know more details about the real value that IPwe brings to the CasperLabs ecosystem in the future?
Medha | CTO Non-asker of coin
IPWe is revolutionizing the IP and Patent industry, by creating a secure marketplace for buyers and sellers to transact on the sale of patents.
They are using the public Casper blockchain to register patent data and ownership. IPWe is an IBM Gold partner, and is opening doors for Casper to work with IBM.
Furthermore, IPWe also has partnerships with over 200 patent offices globally, who will ultimately register all new patents on to the Casper mainnet blockchain.
This is just the beginning of the possibilities.
Enterprise recognizes the benefit of public blockchain technology, they just need their requirements met. Casper does this very well — because I built a protocol that I would use as an Enterprise Engineering Leader.
What is very important to note here is: 1) IPWe is using the PUBLIC Casper blockchain! 2: They will help bring the Patent offices to the Public chain! 3: They are exposing IBM to Casper.
PART 3 — LIVE QUESTIONS
Q1: Can you give me a list 1–3 of the deadly features of your Project that make it stand out from its competitors? What competitive advantage does your platform have that make you feel the most confident in yourself?
Medha | CTO Non-asker of coin
Deadly features: 1. Weighted Accounts & flexible permissions 2. Natively upgradeable contracts with versioning 3. Consensus supports private, consortium, hybrid and public permissionless networks 4. Contracts that pay for themselves (2022) 5. Flexible payment code (meta transactions)
Q2: What are the benefits of holding your token as long term investment? Can you tell us about the motivation and benefits for investors to keep the your token in the long run?
Medha | CTO Non-asker of coin
I have a killer strategy for getting Enterprise on to public blockchain. I’m not going to share it, because other protocols will try it. But our smart contracting engine is built for enterprise, by enterprise developers like me.
Q3: How is your team experience? Has your team background been effective in the success of your project so far?
Medha | CTO Non-asker of coin
Our team is a combination of Blockchain researchers and Enterprise professional software engineers. Because of this, we know how to build an enterprise grade protocol & features. We are not blockchain developers! We are enterprise developers + blockchain researchers! This makes us very unique. Our CEO is from Wall Street & is an early BTC and ETH investor, who understands both capital markets and tokenomics.
Q4: Great user experience is important to all customers, what solutions does Casper have to improve user experience?
Medha | CTO Non-asker of coin
Casper has big plans to simplify the UX of blockchain. We are starting with supporting multiple key types, account recovery, native multi-signature among other features.
Q5: NFT ecosystem is huge and there is fierce competition in the DeFi+NFT space Which NFT project do you see as your competitors? And how do you plan to compete with them?
Medha | CTO Non-asker of coin
Sure — our plans for NFT are enterprise focused. NFT has applications for the tracking of high value items — which has implications for the insurance sector. You can combine NFT with supply chain for example, or chain of custody, or even auctions. So I am less DeFi focused. But the DevDAO can be focused on DeFi.
Our strategy is CasperLabs the company, engages with Enterprises to build solutions and products, and the DevDAO works with the decentralized community to build DeFi applications or dApps. I’m so sorry I couldn’t answer all thhe questions, I will stay and try to answer some more! The questions are very very good!
About PolkaWar
PolkaWar is a decentralized fighting game platform on the blockchain network. Inspired by the NFT subfield, PolkaWar will create a vivid fighting game world. Players will build character systems with weapons and equipment with different levels, to engage in combat with other players; participate in quests in the game as well as buy and sell items in the marketplace.
✅ Website https://polkawar.com
✅ MVP https://game.polkawar.com
✅ Telegram https://t.me/polkawar
✅ Telegram discussion https://t.me/polkawarchat
✅ Twitter https://twitter.com/polkawarnft
✅ Github https://github.com/polkawar
✅ Medium https://medium.com/@polkawar
✅ Whitepaper https://polkawar.com/docs/whitepaper.pdf