Devcon 5: A CasperLabs Retrospective
After a week in Osaka full of stimulating technical and philosophical talks, hacking sessions, research announcements, and thought-provoking conversations, the team at CasperLabs has finally settled back into our home times zones.
We were humbled to be amongst so many builders of all kinds. We sponsored Devcon5 at the Serenity level to show our commitment to Ethereum and the community and more importantly, to show our progress toward our belief that decentralized, unstoppable applications are keys to unlocking the shared future we want to create. Collaborative forums and open-minded discourse are core to the Ethereum community — and we left with a resounding feeling of acceptance, gratitude, and excitement to push the boundaries of our industry forward together.
As Medha, our CTO put it,
“We want to help move the ecosystem forward and we can do that by sharing our research with the community. That was our approach and I think the ETH crowd recognized and appreciated that.”
We were particularly excited to share progress and research on CBC Casper. In a collaboration between researcher Vlad Zamfir of the Ethereum Foundation and CasperLabs, we announced the availability of the Highway Protocol whitepaper, a specification for a live and safe CBC Casper consensus protocol. Michael Birch, software engineering lead at CasperLabs, hosted a community talk and fielded questions about the initiative. If you missed Michael’s talk, don’t fret — we will be scheduling a webcast and AMA soon. [Sign-up for our newsletter and join one of our social channels to make sure you don’t miss it]
Aside from our awesome socks (we gave away 200+ pairs in 30 mins!!?), we were grateful to showcase and receive feedback loops on some key product features. At our booth, Medha showcased our block explorer, CLarity, and ran through demos all day for engaged onlookers. She demonstrated how validators spin up a node, bond nodes, and visualize data in a GraphQL interface, which was a huge hit amongst many ecosystem participants. Alice Henshaw, a solidity developer at Airswap, mentioned
“The research presented by CasperLabs was really interesting. I’m really excited to see the protocol come to life.”
We were also excited to get a shoutout by Vlad Zamfir in his keynote about formalizing CBC Casper.
Overall, we had an incredible experience at Devcon5 and we’re excited to continue our sprint towards Mainnet next year. In the meantime, we’ll continue to share our progress including our upcoming:
⚙️ Node releases (we just released Node 0.8 during Devcon!)
📄 Whitepaper — all new
🛣️ Highway Protocol — official public release
For those of you who missed Devcon this year, but are still interested in what CasperLabs is researching join our official Discord server to stay up to date or even just say hi!
For all general CasperLabs news, subscribe to our newsletter — it’s the best way to stay up-to-date and we promise it’s low touch with no fluff. We look forward to collaborating with you to build the future of decentralized services. In the meantime, keep on building.
Cheers,
The CasperLabs Team
