Mrinal Manohar on Casper Labs’ proof of stake protocol

0:00I'm Ashlyn Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have renal Manohar the CEO of Casper labs renal thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show it's a pleasure to have you here today likewise Ashton thanks for thanks for having me on it's my pleasure you very welcome I'm excited to dive into Casper

0:21labs today if you could start by giving us a short explanation of Casper labs and why your team considers it to be the decentralized future sure if I if I were to step really way back you know I think the industry's had two big tectonic shifts tectonic shift one was the creation of Nakamoto consensus on which bitcoin is based and really the core innovation there is it's the best form

0:49of copy-protection the world's ever seen many people have tried to copy protect mp3s all sorts of stuff and never succeeded and this really found a way to copy protect something that's digital so a digital asset was born and then I think the next big tectonic shift was aetherium when they added curing complete smart contracts on top of it so now those

1:11digital assets became programmable I think what's happening in the it happened in the intervening years is you know people think the next tectonic shift is scalability and some people think that's just throughput but I think of it as throughput scalability and security and also scalability and developer access I think systems aren't scalable unless you get all three of those but I think a

1:33lot of those have come with compromise you know the true decentralization and permissionless principles sometimes have been you know put aside for the sake of expediency on just throughput I call this you know sort of the TPS dilemma I don't think TPS is an excellent metric to be honest it needs to be fast but if it's not decentralized and permissionless there's there's no point

1:58in my opinion so Casper labs really is is all about building a fully decentralized and permissionless system without ever compromising those two things yet providing scale through proof of stake and other engineering in addition to that we take security and developer adoption very very seriously and think those are core components of scalability as well and you know

2:23hopefully this and you know will usher in a the next stage of innovation in the industry great and I'm glad that you touched on Bitcoin the theory I'm in the evolution and currently the the scalability and the the throughput of Bitcoin and aetherium are in the works of getting better but they're not perhaps up to scale of a worldwide adoption using the proof-of-work

2:48consensus algorithm right now could you talk about the differences in Casper's CBC proof of stake algorithm how it's different than etherium and what makes it so much more scalable sure so it's not that different from where etherium wants to get eventually right they do eventually want to get to CBC Kaspar which is a hundred percent proof of stake you know as a running proof of

3:15work Network there's a transitionary you know state going from some of it being proof of work and some of it being proof of stake and then eventually a full switch so that that data likely I you know the development timeline last I saw seems like it's a few years out CDC Casper where ours varies is you know I'm only going off of latest published work

3:40at aetherium the proposals for CBC Casper were not provably live there provably safe and you know the protocol has very very interesting characteristics there but probably live means you know you are guaranteed that the system will come to consensus at some point and we published something called the highway protocol dr. Daniel Caine was the lead researcher on this

4:05and this is a provably live flavor of CBC cast and that's the version that will be part of our first release people can read the paper on our website but we are also in the process of updating it so there will be a highway plus plus coming out soon very cool and you touched on the is a bit of a trade-off between scalability and ensuring that you also

4:30have security and decentralization as well how much focus has been on balancing those three items together um yeah I mean as long as you're not using TPS as your core metric you can actually get all three you can get all three and I'll tell you how you can get all three right so first of all with a pure proof of state system the first piece of efficiency really is that in proof of

4:58work 90 to 95 percent of your processing power generates random numbers and these random numbers have no further utility proof of state kind of flips the switch on this and since there's no random numbers that need to be generated to lend security all that processing power can be refocused on doing useful work like forming consensus or processing transactions so that's where you get you

5:23know a huge lift right right there out the gate and then the second thing is if you do smart things with your virtual machine as well as your block footprint you can now start you know scaling the system to hundreds or thousands of TPS so you know currently in tests we're getting about you know 160 to 200 TPS on a single core so you know if you if you're thinking of an eight core machine

5:48is standard the VM is doing you know sixteen hundred or so and you know we can do that without sacrificing decentralization or security all the security properties of Nakamoto consensus are pretty much preserved in our proof of state protocol and you know we've engineered it from the ground up to be an open permissionless system mmm-hmm that's great that those tests

6:10sound very promising and it'd be great to give a bit of a timeline for the viewers on you know what stage is the Casper labs test net at and you're moving towards a main net what are the dates for that sure I'll start with its software engineering so you know stuff stuff happens our test net launched on type we gave ourselves end of queue on launch date we launched on March 31st this is

6:36our you know first version of the test net we were we are super lucky to have like a we thought we'd have five or six people you know keep it small and close but 22 people signed up so we have 22 validators running right now so you know testers launched its live you know we're you know working through you know it's our first you know public decentralized

6:59release so you know we're we're working through some of like the issues you discover when you when you launch it first but overall we're we're really happy you know we're we're able to have blocks finalized on the network most of the validators are staying in sync and it's helped provide a basis for a lot of the optimizations that we plan to do in the coming months in terms of

7:19launch we we think will be code complete call it a fall and we're looking to launch this year that's great and that's great that you have that many validators jumping on and for clarification for people that aren't familiar with proof of stake and they're used to Bitcoin and aetherium with this validation is it anybody is able to become a validator and anybody is able to stake to help

7:44bring consensus to the network or are there specific you know rules or specifications that validators must follow there are no rules or specifications anyone anyone can join so anyone can join it's a completely open and permissionless system so we don't have any and we don't even have like classes like we don't have you know these are the real a validators these

8:06are the you know these are the super validators we there's no classes so everyone's exactly the same you come to the you come to the table with what with you know your stake and you're able to validate the only the only thing I'd say is we probably have a recommended hardware spec it won't be super expensive because this proof of stake and if you you know if you fall behind

8:30on that you run the risk of falling behind on the state which means your rewards might get throttled a bit because you know you're not you're not keeping up with the rest of the system but other than that you know there's no special requirements as long as you have a stake and you can keep up with the system you're you're you should be all good to go

8:48hmm great to know and as you continue to develop out the main net one of the keys to mainstream option we'll definitely be having some applications on there and for that you'll need a lot of developer support what are the kinds of tools you will have available for developers to build on Casper labs rather than them focused on building on a larger ecosystem like

9:08aetherium yeah that's that's great and so you know we first of all we love this area so you know anything I say about this is that you know it's it's with all due respect you know we're standing on the shoulders of giants here none of this is meant to come across as you know slagging any project in any way so one thing we've noticed when we talked to

9:31like developer communities is and I'll give you a number in context you know there's there's seven to ten thousand blockchain developers most of them know solidity but worldwide there's 26 million developers what this is telling you is penetration of this industry is like sub 0.2% even it's a very very small portion of developers that I'm on boarded and one of the primary reasons

9:54for this is because they don't know where to start and they don't understand the programming languages so one thing a decision we made right out the gate just to embrace open programming standards so we're gonna support rust and assembly script right out the gate but then over time we can basically support any programming language that has a compilation target down OS which is

10:15about 95 percent of them so that's one thing we do and what's great about this is you know you're basically making it an easier system to use you know people are already familiar with these languages there's tons of documentation about them they're highly maintained out there and you know they fit into your IDE Zoar developer environments that you're already used and then I can I can

10:36go into a couple more features that we have so for example querying the state of the blockchain has always been an issue so like on aetherium you use third-party tools like in Fuhrer sometimes we have all of this in the mill we have a graph QL interface and so querying the state becomes fairly straightforward and I know like I don't go too long on this but there's a lot of

10:57other tools we've added too you know we have continuous integration and continuous deployment very very important for businesses we have a lot of contract writers have a lot of control over their your contracts can be upgraded yeah you can decide who can call your contract you can go all from hey I'm a hundred percent open source anyone can call my contract from anywhere to I want this

11:18specific contract to only be callable by me and that you know it's just freedom to develop the tools in the way you want and that combined with a few things like you know we have waited key management we have flexible payment code all of this has come really from feedback from companies looking to build on the blockchain and telling us why they aren't we're like okay let's let's try

11:39to see if we can fix those mm-hmm that's great and with the release of the main net you will also have a Casper lab CLX token now can you explain what's the primary purpose of clx and how is it used within the ecosystem yeah the primary purpose is twofold or the clx token so one is it's the token that will be used to stake as part of our proof of state system so the

12:02underlying security of the system is established by the CLX as it's taking to token the second thing is it's also what you're going to use to use this to pay for usage of the system so if you want to use the CLX network you want to deploy a transaction you want to deploy something off of your application the way you pay your the validator set is through the CLX token it works very

12:26similar to you know gasps ah nice on the etherium network so it looks pretty much like that except it's also a staking joke great and they will be created throughout the Genesis block on the main net I believe what is there how will they be distributed or how do validators access tokens so that they can use them to stake yeah so the token will only be

12:53released after the after the network goes live so we're not gonna do any you know interim token or anything like that so you know once we've gone live you know it'll be listed etc and you know people people can acquire it to either pay for computation on the network or to become a validator but the initial validator set you know can can can acquire tokens privately but it's only

13:16for validation okay and for people that are interested in learning more about the validation and thus taking what's the best way for them to learn more information you can contact the team directly so you know we have we have our discord is where most of our developers so that's usually a pretty developer and engineering intensive conversation so you could go

13:41to our website and join the discord channel or you know you can find us on telegram and we'll we'd be glad to point you to the to the right resources there great well that's all the time that we have renal thank you so much for speaking about caspere labs today congratulations on the recent test net launch and all the best moving forward with the development and I'm interested

14:02in learning more about the CLX as it continues in the main net so let's follow up in the near future