On May 8th, developers released an improvement to Ethereum’s economic consensus protocol, known as Casper.

Developer of the code – known fully as Hybrid Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget – Danny Ryan, uploaded a ‘first release’ to GitHub on Tuesday.

Amongst other things, this new version of the protocol will help the Ethereum network work more closely with traditional legal infrastructure globally, by becoming more user friendly. Ryan remarked of the development: “v0.1.0 marks us more clearly tagging releases to help clients and external auditors more easily track the contract and changes.”

Ryan said in a Reddit post on the upgrade:

“More than just the research team is using the contract now — auditors, client devs, etc — so we wanted to start issuing clearer versioning and changelogs to help everyone stay organized.”

Originally Casper FFG, which first saw publication in October 2017, aimed to solve problems associated with crypto-mining by marking the beginning of a proposed transition from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus.

In April of this year, Hybrid Casper FFG was announced which would create a hybrid system of PoW and PoS, with the end goal of full transition to PoS in mind.

It also significantly contains changes to the block reward for miners, reducing it from 3.0 ETH to 0.6 ETH.

“The PoW block reward is reduced to 0.6 ETH/block because the security of the chain is greatly shifted from PoW difficulty to PoS finality and because rewards are now issued to both validators and miners.” said the text which accompanied the proposal.

It is hoped that PoS will address some of the problems associated with mining such as high energy consumption, as well as reducing the power miners have over the network.

Image Source: “Flickr”