Ethereum 2.0: Casper Set To Launch Testnet This Year

On 11th January 2019, the third Blockchain Connect Conference was held in San Francisco. The event was highly anticipated by the Ethereum community as at the end of the conference, Vitalik Buterin closed with a speech on the future of the cryptocurrency.

Buterin is the co-founder of the third biggest cryptocurrency (at the time of writing) and at the CBC Casper (correct-by-construction Casper) is a new safe Asynchronous Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus, mainly proposed by Ethereum team research Vlad Zamfir. For those that don’t know, Casper is a verification system and in order to join it, the certifier needs to take a certain percentage of the Ethereum that they own so that they will then have a safety margin. If the verifier acts in a malicious manner to reverse the block, then the evidence can be submitted to confiscate the verifier’s margin. I guess crime does pay… just not in the usual sense.

According to Hackernoon; Casper “emphasizes on finality”. Essentially, this means that the canonical chain, which all the users should pay attention to, isn’t selected using the longest chain rule but LMD GHOST (Latest Message Driven GHOST), which is modified based on the GHOST consensus algorithm.

If you compare this to the current FFG version, Buterin has admitted that CBC Casper will have that extra elegance to it. You will be able to use for any POS and at the same time it will improve scalability with effective means as well as being able to be deployed faster in Ethereum.

During the Q&A session, Buterin was asked about the specific implementation plan of Casper to which he responded with official confirmation that if the development team goes to plan then the testnet will be launched this year.

In terms of the development for Ethereum 2.0, Buterin went on to share his vision for the future. The co-founder of Ethereum believes that thanks to the Beacon Chain, the second version will be able to manage the Casper protocol and maybe even reach sharding functions.

In terms of how well Ethereum is performing at the moment, the token is currently the third biggest cryptocurrency in the market and has a price of $121.68 after suffering a 2.50 percent decrease over the past 24 hours at the time of writing.

What are your thoughts? Let us know what you think down below in the comments!