Ethereum 2.0: Casper will launch testnet this year

The third Blockchain Connect Conference was held on Jan 11, 2019 in San Francisco. The most anticipated part of the conference was definitely the closing speech by the founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin. How will Ethereum continue to develop? Vitalik highlighted CBC Casper and Ethereum 2.0 at the conference.

Vitalik explained the basics of CBC Casper: CBC Casper (correct-by-construction Casper) is a new safe asynchronous Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus, mainly proposed by Ethereum team researcher Vlad Zamfir. Casper is a verification system. In order to join the system, the certifier needs to take a certain percentage of the Ethereum they have as a safety margin. If the verifier acts maliciously to reverse the block, then the evidence can be submitted to confiscate the verifier’s margin, making the cost of the crime very expensive.

Casper emphasizes on finality. This means the canonical chain (that is, the chain that users should pay attention to) is not longer selected using the longest chain rule, but LMD GHOST (Latest Message Driven GHOST), which is modified based on the GHOST consensus algorithm.

Compared to the existing FFG version (Vitalik’s version of Casper), Vitalik admits that CBC Casper will be more elegant. It can be used for any POS, at the same time it will effectively improve scalability and be deployed faster in Ethereum.

In the Q&A session, when asked about the specific implementation plan of Casper, Vitalik officially revealed that if the development team works well, the testnet will be launched this year.

Around the development of Ethereum 2.0, Vitalik shared his vision. Vitalik believes that thanks to the Beacon Chain, Ethereum 2.0 will be able to manage the PoS Protocol (Casper) and achieve sharding functions.