Everything you need to know about Casper Network

Blockchain technology is one of the most revolutionizing technologies and has the potential to disrupt almost every field. The more possibilities we explore in the blockchain, the more potential blockchain applications we will get. Entrepreneurs, legislators, and investors are increasingly adopting blockchain technology to change companies’ communication with other companies, regulators, and customers.

As more and more companies are eager to implement blockchain technology, their ecosystem has become more diverse and dynamic. Blockchain is a powerful innovation that can drive positive change in various finance, supply chain, food, and insurance.

The implementation of the blockchain provides the ability to provide a decentralized ecosystem, transparency and immutability to completely change the world of technology.

One such revolutionary blockchain project recently established is Casper network. Let’s explore more about Casper network in this article.

What is Casper Network?

Founded in 2018 by Medha Parlikar and Mrinal Manohar, Casper is the first real-time Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain based on the Casper CBC specification. The Casper platform aims to promote the global adoption of blockchain technology, smart contracts and DApps.

With its future-oriented architecture, Casper targets that the platform is continuously developed in accordance with the changing needs of its users and to serve developers of all backgrounds to the fullest.

According to the official white paper, Casper has been optimized for the needs of businesses and developers. Casper’s mission is to usher in a newly developed era for Web3 as the demand for intuitive and connected services continues to grow across the board.

Casper does this by solving the adoption trilemma: providing enterprise-level security, scalability, and decentralization on the same blockchain protocol.

Casper can be defined as a Turing-complete smart-contracts platform, supported by a WebAssembly (WASM) and a PoS consensus algorithm. Casper is a public blockchain network with a permission-less mechanism. Casper network has a specific consensus protocol known as Highway. The Highway consensus protocol has various benefits over the consensus protocols called classic Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT).

For instance, the Highway consensus protocol permits the network to attain the higher threshold of finalizing the blocks to be added. It helps the validators to agree with adding the blocks on the network.

Another benefit that the Highway consensus protocol gives is that it helps achieve flexibility by expressing the finalization of blocks, which cannot be done in the classic Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT). The Highway protocol is created on Vlad Zamfir’s correct-by-construction (CBC) Casper research.

Furthermore, the Casper network is specifically designed for developer adoption and enterprise. While blockchain technology is being leveraged, the networks try to push the business operations through distinct attributes, for instance, predictable network fees, privacy flexibility, upgradeable contracts, and on-chain governance.

Casper also performs the functionality of solving the scalability issue on the blockchain platform. This network is particularly optimized for security, high throughput, and decentralization. All of the factors are achieved with the constant evolution of Casper, and it also provides the best-known solutions for various enterprises and open-source projects.

With such an amicable mechanism of the network, there are ample of reasons to choose Casper while selecting a Blockchain network. Let’s understand in the next section why you should prefer Casper over any other platform.

How is Casper Beneficial? 

Casper’s fundamental attributes and strengths allow the developers and other enterprises to enjoy the benefits of blockchain technology. Casper supports the direct upgrade of smart contracts on the chain without a complicated migration process, making it easier for developers to fix smart contract vulnerabilities. Below mentioned are some of the benefits of the Casper network:

• Developer Friendly Language
  The Casper Network development ecosystem is designed to support WebAssembly, not written in proprietary languages ​​such as Solidity. Its feature simplifies the development path of companies and development teams that want to build on the Casper network.
• Account Management
  Other basic functions include an account permission model that can recover lost keys and a permission model to securely share state between accounts and contracts (without the need for expensive encryption control).
• Predictable Network Fees
  Casper aims to eliminate volatility and improve the developer and business experience by setting transparent, consistent and predictable natural gas prices. This feature is designed to promote active and diverse online behavior.

With these benefits, the mechanism of the Casper network is technically appealing and user-friendly. Let us now dive into the fundamentals of Casper’s mechanism and understand how its network works.

How does Casper Network work? 

Casper depends on the group validators to validate the transactions and continue with the network. It is different from the Proof-of-Work network, as the PoW networks demand to centralize the validators for the sake of economies of scale. Casper, on the same hand, permits for a geographically dependent decentralization of the validators.

Casper also facilitates the verification of the transactions with the help of its validators based on the tokens that are stacked. They also receive the CSPR rewards concerning their participation in the mechanism of PoS consensus. Casper network has its native token known as the CSPR token.

How does Casper Network communicate? 

• Network communication
  Nodes form a network between peers, and these peers continuously communicate with each other to reach a particular consensus on the state of the blockchain. The node is not necessarily a single physical machine. Nevertheless, it still responds to incoming network traffic by having a unique ID and address, thereby appearing as a unique logical entity to its other peers.
• Identity
  Each node has a distinct identity on the network (different from its Identity in the consensus process). The Identity (ID) of the network is based on the public key fingerprint of the self-signed TLS certificate. A new private key is generated every time a node is started to ensure unique identification.Each Identity is associated with an address, which is an IP and a pair of ports that can access the node. This address is also called the endpoint.
• Inter-node connection
  If a node wants to connect to some other node with a known endpoint, it opens a TLS connection to the endpoint address. With reference to the common TLS terminology, this makes the connecting node the client and the remote node the server for this connection. During connection establishment, the client verifies the server’s certificate, matching the expected public Identity of the endpoint to ensure that we are connected to the correct node. In addition, the TLS parameters of the connection and certificate need to contain the same password, digest, etc., to prevent downgrade attacks.
  At the same time, the connecting node sends its certificate as the client certificate, allowing the server to perform the same reverse sign-in and establish the client’s Identity. At the end of the process, both the nodes can determine which pair they are connected to. After the connection is established, if it is a one-way connection, the server will immediately reconnect to the node based on its endpoint (see Discovering Nodes to learn how the server finds the endpoint).If a two-way connection cannot be established within a certain period of time, all peer ID connections are discarded. The connection is used to send one-way messages; only the node that initiated the connection will send messages about it.
• Network
  Once a node is connected to a node on the network, it will participate in node discovery. Generally speaking, any node will try to connect to any other node it finds on the network, as described above, thus forming a fully connected network. Two types of data transmission occur on the network; broadcast and gossip. A broadcast message is sent once, without guarantee, to all nodes connected to it. The gossip process is described in more detail below. In general, only consensus messages sent by active validators will be broadcast. Everything else is gossip.
• Gossip
  Gossip about various types of objects, the most prominent being blocks, implementations, and endpoints (see Identity). Each of these objects are immutable and can be identified by a unique hash. Gossip is a process of distributing a value throughout the network without sending it directly to each node. This process allows only a portion of the nodes to connect to the original sender and distribute the bandwidth and processing requirements across the entire network at the cost of delay and total bandwidth consumed.Although gossip and streaming are sufficient to distribute data across the network in most cases, nodes can also request missing data from their peers when required. A common example is the lack of implementation in the block. Verify that objects have the concept of relevance. For example, a block depends on all implementations whose hash value is contained in it. If all dependencies for a node are available on the local node, the node considers any object to be valid.If the node receives an object from the pair that is not yet valid, it will attempt to complete its verification before continuing with processing. In the case of gossip, this means suspending the object’s gossip until all of its dependencies can be recovered. Any node is only responsible for broadcasting valid objects. If a node does not retrieve all the missing dependencies of the object from the peer who sent it, it can punish the peer
• Node Discovery
  Node Discovery occurs when each node regularly talks about its public address. After receiving the address via gossip, each node immediately tries to establish a connection with it and records the resulting endpoint (if successful).

Conclusion

Casper network is the first-ever initiative towards innovating a blockchain platform that solves the concern of enterprise adoption. Casper network eventually minimizes the obstacles that you may face while planning to adopt a blockchain platform by assisting in all the professional services and by taking care of the construction of business on Casper’s blockchain ecosystem. If you are inquisitive about the Casper network and plan to avail of its blockchain platform for your organization and business, get in touch with our developers at LeewayHertz for better knowledge of Casper blockchain .