Ethereum’s Casper Update On The Horizon: What You Need To Know

Ethereum’s developers have announced the platform’s highly anticipated Casper update could be rolled out potentially as early as the next “Constantinople” hard-fork.

Casper will represent the initialization of Ethereum’s shift away from the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus protocol toward a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol.

Importantly, the final rendtion of Casper isn’t finalized yet. ETH’s top developers are scrutinizing two renditions of Casper—what they’ve termed Casper CBC and Casper FFG.

For now, though, it looks like the devs are leaning toward the FFG version. As the Casper FFG whitepaper points out:

“Casper is a partial consensus mechanism combining proof-of-stake algorithm research and Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus theory.”

Essentially, then, the FFG version will be the “blueprint” that Ethereum follows in switching to PoS. Conversely, the CBC rendition will actually govern Ethereum’s consensus process once the PoS system is implemented.

When it comes down to it, the final edition of Casper will surely be inspired by the best parts of both Casper CBC and Casper FFG.

This shift will allow “stakers” to secure the ETH network for annual profits by holding their coins in approved wallets as opposed to the current system in which miners are responsible for securing the network.

Seeing to it that Casper’s implemented smoothly will mark a milestone years in the coming for the team.

Indeed, the situation looks bright now, as ETH founder Vitalik Buterin’s saying everything’s mapped out nicely:

“It should be done … I would say very soon. The parts that aren’t done are fine details of the contract . The actual spec of the fork is not going to be particularly complex. It’s basically just increase the balance of a contract then change the fork choice rule by adding a couple function calls going into the Casper contract. If those details change, that would not affect anything of the client implementation by much.”







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