Learn about the Casper Network, a groundbreaking Layer-1 Proof-of-Stake blockchain designed for business applications. Explore its innovative features, including upgradeable smart contracts, low transaction costs, and enterprise-friendly architecture. Discover how Casper is revolutionizing blockchain with its scalable, secure, and developer-friendly platform.
What is Casper?
The Casper Network, launched in March 2021, is a groundbreaking blockchain platform that employs a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism to enhance efficiency and reduce costs associated with blockchain technology. Developed with insights from Ethereum developers, Casper is focused on advancing smart contracts, decentralized applications (DApps), and asset tokenization, particularly for business applications.
Governed by the Casper Association, a non-profit organization, the network is designed to drive blockchain adoption in business processes through its enterprise-friendly architecture. It supports widely-used programming languages like Rust and Wasm, making scalability more accessible and cost-effective. As the first Layer 1 (L1) PoS protocol of its kind, Casper addresses the limitations of previous technologies, including Ethereum, by offering features such as upgradeable smart contracts and low transaction costs. It aims to solve the blockchain trilemma by ensuring security, scalability, and decentralization without compromise.
Learn more about Casper Network.
Why businesses and developers choose Casper?
User-friendly
Casper supports the upgrade of smart contracts on-chain without requiring a complicated migration process, all while maintaining lower gas fees. This makes it easier for developers to fix bugs in smart contracts.
Easy to use
The Casper Network supports multiple programming languages, simplifying the development process for smart contracts and DApps.
Transparent Network Fees
Casper Network’s fee structure is transparent, open, and predictable, allowing developers to access and control network fee spending effectively.
Network Architecture
Global State
All accounts, contracts, and associated data on a Casper network are stored in global state. As explained above, global state exists as Casper’s storage layer and can be represented as a Merkle trie key-value store.
Casper’s trie features a radix of 256, with each branch node having up to 256 children. A path through the tree can be an array of bytes, with serialization linking a key with a path through the tree as its associated value.
A trie node can be one of the following types:
- A leaf, which includes a key and a value.
- A branch, which has up to 256 blake2b256 hashes, pointing to up to 256 other nodes in the trie.
- An extension node, which includes a byte array (called the affix) and a blake2b256 hash pointing to another node in the trie.
The extension node allows for path compression. Rather than traveling through a series of branch nodes, the extension node can feature an affix equal to the initial bytes in the series and a point to the first non-trivial branch node in the sequence.
When interacting with a Casper network, accounts are either viewing data stored in global state, attempting to install additional code in the form of a contract, or interacting with previously installed contracts. Any changes to global state occur through the finalizing of blocks to be added to the overall chain, creating a historical account of all alterations made since the genesis of the Casper network in question.
Unforgeable References
Unforgeable references are a key type representing the majority of data in a Casper blockchain – with the notable exception of Accounts.
Referred to as URefs, unforgeable references carry permission information to prevent unauthorized use of the value stored under their key. The runtime tracks this permission information and will raise a forged URef error if malicious Wasm attempts to produce a URef without appropriate permissions.
Blocks
A block is the primary data structure through which network nodes communicate information about the state of a Casper network. Casper networks exist as a blockchain, a perpetual continuation of blocks added sequentially and representing immutable historical data.
Each block consists of a block header, a body, and a block hash derived from the blake2b256 hash of the block header.
The body contains an ordered list of hashes for deploys and native transfers. These deploys can be broadly categorized as some unit of work that, when executed and committed, affect change to global state.
The block header contains a variety of information necessary for continued blockchain operations, as well as the hash of the body as described above.
Casper Network Use Cases
Casper Network’s focus on the future positions it for multiple utilizations as the world moves toward widespread adoption of blockchain.
Tokenization
Tokenization involves the creation of digital tokens that can represent both virtual and physical assets, so they can be easily traded on a blockchain. It also facilitates fractionalization of assets, which enables users to buy a portion of an expensive asset at a fraction of its total price, opening up the market to more buyers. Additionally, tokenization fosters the development of self-sustaining microeconomies. For instance, by tokenizing a building, the tokens can be used for various purposes like paying rent, maintenance and even renovations.
As an L1 blockchain, Casper offers a secure and efficient platform for businesses to utilize tokenization and create new economic opportunities.
Upgradeable NFTs
Casper’s upgradeable smart contracts extend to NFTs, allowing creators to update their smart contracts without incurring high gas fees, fostering a vibrant creator economy.
Unified On-chain Financial Standards
Casper can facilitate the adoption of blockchain technology in financial transactions by implementing the open-source ACTUS algorithmic standard, promoting market integrity and resilience.
On-chain Ownership Rights
Casper’s NFT-based chain of custody solution for public patent records ensures the security of ownership rights by creating and storing patents as NFTs.
Casper Network Key Features
As a highly scalable network, Casper is optimized with relevant blockchain-based features to help developers and enterprises grow in a truly permissionless way. Let’s look at the notable features of the Casper network as it helps shape the future of blockchain.
Energy-Efficient PoS Consensus
At the core of Casper’s architecture is its Highway Protocol. The Highway was built on Casper’s correct by-construction (CBC) specification to create an energy-efficient and flexible consensus protocol.
Unlike classic consensus protocols such as Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), Highway provides an improved version of block validation. Networks on Highway can reach higher thresholds of finality in a non-binary way, which allows more blocks to be finalized. Additionally, Highway provides flexibility to configure security thresholds for participating nodes, even slower ones.
According to a power usage comparison report by CasperLabs, Casper’s network operating 400 nodes is 47,000% more energy-efficient than Ethereum, and a remarkable 136,000% more energy-efficient as compared to Bitcoin. These findings are shown in the table below:
Upgradeable Smart Contracts
Casper is a future-proof blockchain that enables smart contract upgradeability, which has given the network a competitive edge over other enterprise blockchains. Casper uses a package management model for smart contracts, which allows direct upgrading of contracts that have been deployed on-chain.
Such a model eliminates the need for migration processes that can be costly and complex. Additionally, it ensures that developers can quickly add new features, or address any vulnerabilities, such as fixing bugs, by providing a new smart contract version.
Previously, developers couldn’t edit a smart contract once deployed. Such contract upgrade features on Casper ensure that enterprises can build resilient products that adapt to shifting business needs and consumer trends.
Developer-Friendly
Casper Network is a haven for developers. The network is keen on making life easy for developers who build on its friendly infrastructure. Casper supports WebAssembly (Wasm), which eliminates dependence on proprietary languages such as Solidity.
Moreover, CasperLabs has developed a Solidity transpiler that automates the conversion of Solidity-based DApps into Rust, a safe and highly performing programming language.
By creating a developer-friendly building environment, Casper helps drive enterprise blockchain adoption through simplified migration into the network.
Enterprise Grade
As an enterprise-focused blockchain, Casper Network gives enterprises the freedom to choose between public, permissioned and private networks without affecting the security or performance of the blockchain.
Predictable Low Gas Fees
Casper’s advanced PoS mechanism plays a major role in ensuring relatively stable fees on the network. With its Highway Protocol, there’s less congestion on the network as it ensures block validation validity, enabling a low gas fee structure that’s transparent and consistent.
Conclusion
The Casper Network emerges as a paradigm-shifting force in the blockchain landscape, offering a scalable, secure, and sustainable platform for decentralized applications. With its innovative architecture, consensus mechanism, and diverse range of use cases, Casper Network paves the way for the next generation of decentralized innovation.
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