BW.com AMA with CasperLabs probe deeply into the blockchain for the builders
The AMA (Ask Me Anything) held by the BW.com official Telegram, and inviting the Mrinal Manohar, CEO of CasperLabs and Scott Walker, co-founder and Managing Director of CasperLabs. In almost 60 minutes, Mrinal and Scott answered all the questions in terms of CasperLabs. They also shared their opinion on the blockchain for the builders.
Here is the editor record：
Section 1: Introduction
Host: Hi BW family members and community friends, I’m Cathy Zhu, BW global CEO. It’s my great pleasure to invite Mrinal Manohar CEO of CasperLabs and Scott Walker, co-founder and Managing Director of CasperLabs to BW community for an online AMA this evening. Welcome!
Guest: Both Scott and Mrinal to say Hello to the BW official community.
Host: Mrinal, Scott, can you give us a brief introduction about you please?
Guest ：
Mrinal:
Hi, I’m Mrinal, One of the cofounders of CasperLabs. I’ve been fascinated with technology from a young age and began programming at 11. I got my MS from Carnegie Mellon and after internships at Microsoft at Oracle and Microsoft went to work with Bain & Company, Bain Capital and was the Sector head for Technology at $1.2Bn hedge fund. I’ve been in this space for a long time, programming as an open source contributor to BitTorrent in 2002 and then Investing in Cryptocurrency since 2012. I Invested at the earliest stages in Ethereum, Blockstack, Basis, Maker, Filecoin etc. I love this industry and am excited that we are just getting started.
Scott
Greetings everyone my name is Scott Walker, I am an early (2012) BTC miner along with my business partner Brock Pierce together we began investing bitcoin into various projects starting with Mastercoin back in June of 2013. The point is we have been in the space for over 8 years now. I performed the first ICO which was Mastercoin (we raised 5000 BTC) which is now Omni and this design became a phenomenon. I was also a seed investor in Ethereum and helped launch the EOS network. I am more excited about CasperLabs than any other protocol I have worked with, and I’ve seen all the major ones.
Q1
Host： It is our great pleasure to have you here with us today to share about CasperLabs.The first question: Some of BW community members may know little about CasperLabs. Can you please give our members a brief introduction about CasperLabs.
Guest：
Scott
I will give everyone a short history of the word “Casper” and what it means to the crypto world (also why it’s so important)
Back in 2013 there was a famous “boy genius” named Vitalik who was writing articles for Bitcoin magazine. He began talking about “smart contracts” and came up with something called Ethereum… But in 2014 Vitalik realized the codebase of Ethereum would not scale so he hired a team of researchers to begin work on scaling Ethereum, along with Vlad zamfir they proposed a solution called Casper Proof of stake.
Enter the solution, Casper the friendly ghost… Finally! Everyone was excited, the price of ETH skyrocketed… Now let’s fast forward to 2017, after an initial CBC Casper specification from Vitalik and Vlad. Vitalik decided to NOT fork and has launched a scaling solution called FFG Casper (which basically slowly changes Eth from POW to POS over several years)
The CasperLabs developers fell in love with the original ethos of CBC Casper technology and we went out and raised just over $15M in equity to launch the network, and we didn’t need to sell a single token because the story was powerful. We believe it is the most powerful blockchain technology ever released. Don’t take our word for it, Vitalik says this every day. The issue was proving that this protocol was also live.
Enter the next big moment. We have been fortunate to work with Dr. Daniel Kane a renowned mathematician with multiple degrees and PhD’s from MIT and Harvard, Dr. Kane has won pretty much every major mathematical award in North America and is one of our best (if not THE best ). He proposed an upgrade to traditional CBC Casper that is both more efficient and now provably live. The mathematical proof is on our website.
Q2:
Host： Why do you call CasperLabs is the blockchain for the builders?
Mrinal
Builders and developers require the right technical underpinnings as well as the right set of tools. We give builders unprecedented access
Firstly we have embraced open programming standards.
The chart on the left shows that while solidity is the most used smart contracting language today with ~10k developers, this number is much smaller than the 26 million total developers out there.
The chart on the right shows that Rust has the highest approval rating amongst programming languages (From Stack overflows survey which had over 90,000 respondents)
The CasperLabs blockchain supports Rust and Assembly Script right out the gate as contracting languages. This makes it very easy for developers to use familiar tools. By embracing open standards, we will be able to create a platform that welcomes all 26 million developers.
Secondly, we have a set of tools that significantly make the developer experience easier, including
1. Flexible payment code (Sender does not always have to pay)
2. Weighted key management (You can create any kind of threshold system)
3. Upgradeable contracts (Never lose control of your systems)
4. Direct state querying (Easy data access)
Glad to go into detail on any of these.
Q3
Host：What is the biggest problem with current similar mainnet you see? What pain point does CasperLabs solve?
Guest：
Scott
Firstly, I think there are core reasons why public chains have not seen mainstream adoption yet. The developer experience is difficult and does not mirror the experiences they are used to (custom programming languages like solidity, plutus etc). As Medha mentioned in her previous response, we support open programming languages and tools.
In addition, there are no public blockchains that achieve scalability while maintaining full security (not just probabilistic security) and decentralization, a lot of new generation blockchains have some centralizing features as well as a tendency to have very concentrated ownership structures. For example, Hashgraph has a council of only 39 members that can propose blocks and all of these are decided by the company and other council members. Similarly, all other protocols have some sort of sacrifice to a truly open and decentralized platform.
Q4
Host： How does CasperLabs ensure a high level of security protection on the basis of decentralization?
Guest：
Mrinal
CasperLabs has very rigorous security standards, meaning we rely on provable Mathematical security rather than probabilistic security. This is largely aided by the cutting edge work from Drs Daniel Kane and Andreas Fackler.
We are fully Byzantine fault-tolerant and have considered all major attack types include 1. Cartel formation 2. Long Range Attacks 3. Equivocations 4. Double spend attacks 5. Sybil attacks etc. Our mathematical proof lays it out here
(https://github.com/CasperLabs/highway/releases/download/v1.0/highway.pdf)
We are also immune to several DDoS style attacks that have not been uncovered by recent research. There are a family of DDoS attacks that we think most proof of stake chains are vulnerable to and have not anticipated. We will be publishing this research soon.
Q5
Host：Can you tell us a bit more about the team and team background of CasperLabs
Mrinal
We have a staff of 30+ individuals (Over 66% of them being engineers). But If I were to talk about a few.
1. Dr Daniel Kane: He is a renowned silicon valley mathematician who got a double bachelors from MIT and his PhD from Harvard. He is the primary author on our “highway protocol” flavor of CBC Casper which is the first mathematically provably live and secure protocol which makes no Compromises to Security. He has a wikipedia article on him (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kane_(mathematician)
2. Dr. Andreas Fackler, got his PhD at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.. He held roles at Google for several years and has also worked on the Maidsafe and Honeybadger protocols. He is a very accomplished engineer and worked extensively with Dr. Kane on our variant of CBC Casper
3. Medha Parlikar our CTO : decades of experience delivering production software at marquee companies such as Adobe, Omniture, Avalara, MP3.com and DivX, managing very large engineering teams
4. Cliff Sarkin Our COO: A graduate of Harvard Law School, who sold the first startup he worked at to Microsoft (In the image recognition space). A silicon valley veteran
Message 2:
I wish I had time to talk about everyone at the company, but everyone has similar backgrounds. For example over 80% of the team have Masters and graduate degrees most from Ivy league or equivalent schools. On average members of the team have about 15 years of experience, both at leading companies like Bain Capital, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Avalara, Amazon, DropBox, but also protocols such as Ethereum, HoneyBadger, Maidsafe and several others.
Q6
Host：What is your timeline and when will CasperLabs launch?
Guest：
Mrinal
Message 1:
We started building since November of 2018.There has been almost a year and a half of development work done by a relatively large team of 30+ full time employees and dozens of advisors and consultants who have helped refine the platform.
Below is our timeline. We just launched our Testnet on March 31st and look forward to releasing Mainnet at the end of this year.
Q7
Host：How was funding achieved to date?
Scott
We had a series A which closed in mid 2019 where we raised $14.5m. The series A was unique in two ways.
Firstly we did not sell any tokens and merely sold equity in the company. This was a new structure, but we think it is important to avoid centralization.
Secondly while we were supported by the most well known funds in the blockchain space we attracted a lot of capital from traditional wall street investors who had never invested in blockchain before.This information is public
(https://www.coindesk.com/acuitas-arrington-xrp-capital-back-14-5-million-series-a-for-casperlabs)
The round was led by financier Terren Piezer — known as the “Zelig of Wall Street” — via his personal holding company, Acuitas Group Holdings. This is their first and only investment into blockchain technology.
Other investors include Hashkey (part of Wanxiang group), SNZ Holdings, Hyundai, Rocktree Capital Beijing, OneBoat Capital, Arrington XRP Capital (Owned by Michael Arrington, founder of techcrunch), Consensus Capital, Axiom Holdings Group, Digital Strategies, MW Partners, Blockchange Ventures (Ken Seiff) and distributed global.
We are very fortunate to have such a well regarded and helpful set of investors who are extremely well connected within blockchain.
We plan no token sales before launch other than private validation and staking sales to create the utility and security behind the initial network.
Q8
Host：Some people comment that CasperLabs is close to Ethereum 3.0. Would you be able to elaborate on this?
Mrinal
Let me clarify the terms
Eth 3.0, is the full transition to a CBC Casper Based pure proof of stake protocol. We are just using already established terms.
What Ethereum is building for Eth 2.0 — Casper FFG is a ‘finality gadget’ — it is an overlay on top of Proof of Work. Miners will still have to use PoW to propose a block. Then PoS validators will use Casper FFG to ‘finalize’ that block. We go directly to a full PoS protocol based on the initial specification of CBC Casper. This is the hard part with CBC-Casper, as the 2017 paper did not specify an implementable protocol. This is the research that we completed as part of our version of CBC Casper called “Highway”.
The reason Ethereum has the transition phase of Casper FFG is primarily driven by the fact that Ethereum is currently a PoW chain and as a result requires a completely different hardware specification; this compels having a transition phase.
Since we are building from scratch and have been conducting research on CBC Casper since November of 2018, we have laser focussed on a pure fully decentralized PoS based on advanced mathematical research. We are excited about seeing what people end up building on it!
Q9
Host：I heard a new term of EVO. Can you tell us what it is and how did you come up with EVO?
Guest：
Scott
There is a reason why we have not sold any tokens to date. The typical situation where:
1) A small number of institutional investors with large check sizes and very low prices are offset by
2) A large number of retail participants with small checks sizes and much higher prices
Has created market chaos and we feel is inherently unfair, retail investors do not get to participate with the same terms and rights as institutional investors.
The reason for the EVO is to give retail participants (if they choose) access to the exact same terms on our first-ever token sale as the institutions. It’s structured to democratize access and has not been done before. Participants in the EVO will basically have their tokens be part of building and launching the CasperLabs network. It is the first and only sale until the network launches.
Q10
Host：last question, What is the development of CasperLabs’s current community?
Guest：
Mrinal
Our community engagement has grown significantly since we finished our Series A. Below is a chart summarizing community
We have community members in Over 15 countries, with USA and China being the largest. Independent groups/communities (In Tukey and Italy) have formed unofficially and we encourage informal community growth. We have recently spoken to over 10,000 participants across AMA’s such as this one and we have seen an average 290% increase MoM in community and exposure since October 2019. Our telegram and we chat groups were in the hundreds but now reach on telegram on WeChat is over 3K and 5K respectively and continue to increase. Across our social channels (Facebook, Twitter , LinkedIn etc) we increased from 104K exposures in Q3 2019 to a combined reach of 290k in Q1 2020. Our mailing list has also increased from under 2k participants to just under 11k now.
Some selected question from BW community:
Q1: Can you explain the main advantages of the CasperLabs platform to DApps? and What types of dApps are currently supported by the CasperLabs project? @Valentin Esteve
Guest (MRINAL):
Valentin,
Several things, but If I could point out to some
1. We support Rust and Assemblyscript out the gate and over time all programming languages that compile down to WASM code (about 95% of languages) will be supported
2. Related to #1, all familiar IDEs and SDKS are supported as a result of open programming standards, so programmers will be very comfortable with it.
3. We have a very rigorous set of enterprise-ready features including CI/CD.
All details can be found here (https://techspec.casperlabs.io/en/latest/)
In terms of DaPPs, we are turing complete. So like ethereum you can build anything on CasperLabs
Q2:It has been proven over and over, adoption is a most vital part towards a projects success.What’s being done by $Casperlab to drive global adoption amidst the typical crypto regulations and legislation? @Crypto Devil
Guest (MRINAL):I agree. We will have a developer DAO (To which we have allocated a lot of tokens) and these will be distributed over several years. This will look a lot like the Amazon AWS style credits system. We have already recruited some of the top developers (most of them not even blockchain, but from companies like Amazon, DropBox etc.) to help run this DAO
Q3: Could you explain what’s the main advantages of this Casper Based Proof of Stake Consensus in CasperLabs?@Akshay Adwani
Guest (MRINAL):Yes, It does not sacrifice decentralization, permissionlessness at all. It’s a fully open system that is fairly unique in the PoS space. Additionally, we use the CBC methodology (Correct by construction) so the safety and liveness is fully mathematically provable as opposed to being statistical.
Thanks for watching this AMA.
CasperLabs（CLX）Links：
Official Website：https://casperlabs.io
White Paper: https://techspec.casperlabs.io/en/latest/
Telegram: https://t.me/casperlabs
Twitter: https://twitter.com/meetCasperLabs
Also you can reach us:
BW official website: www.bw.com | www.bw.io
BW official telegram: https://t.me/BW_support
BW official twitter: https://twitter.com/BWWord
