At 3th May, 15:00 (UTC+8), XT.COM did another live streaming !
Host：
Weber, CEO of XT.COM
Guest :
Cathy Zhu, Managing Director of China of CasperLabs
Weber: Hi, everyone! Welcome to the XT AMA Channel. I’m Weber, CEO at XT.com. I am hosting today’s AMA with CasperLabs. Let me give a brief introduction to XT first.
XT.com is the world’s first real-time social trading platform with 0% leverage interest. The XT ecosystem has over 6 million global users with a daily transaction volume of close to $5 billion. The platform has real-time indicators and tools that bring the best trading atmosphere for all users.
XT exchange’s innovative social model empowers the blockchain industry through newly developed social trading avenues, which were once not possible. XT has achieved this through a combined effort with our partners, like Bananatok.
Today, our guest is Cathy Zhu, Managing Director of China of CasperLabs. Let’s talk to him to learn about CasperLabs.
Hello Cathy , thank you for joining us for the XT.com and CasperLabs AMA!
Cathy Zhu：Hi This is Cathy Zhu, Managing Director of Casperlabs for China. It is my great pleasure to be here with you. Thanks XT team for inviting me.
Weber: Can you give our audience a brief introduction of CasperLabs as well as the inspiration to build CasperLabs?
Cathy Zhu: I believe most of us on the team have very similar reasons why we are excited to launch this protocol. I can speak personally though.
CasperLabs came about because we thought we could deliver a truly decentralized Proof-Of-Stake system that was developer friendly at the perfect time when such a platform was needed. Blockchain is under-penetrated with only 10–15k developers out of 26 million (0.6% penetration), things are just getting started. We’d love to contribute to helping create systems that bring mass adoption.
Weber: Can you introduce the core team members of CasperLabs? We hear that the team is highly experienced, can we get some examples?
Cathy Zhu: Over 66% of our team are being engineers including scientist .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, Amazon, DropBox, but also protocols such as Ethereum, HoneyBadger, Maidsafe and several others.
But If I were to talk about a few.
- 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.
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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.
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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.
Weber: In the Crypto industry, what do you think of the current state? What do you think that needs to be improved?
Cathy Zhu: Every new technology takes a significant amount of time to gain mainstream adoption. Amazon AWS took 9 years to break into the mainstream and the internet took decades to become the phenomenon that it has become.
As a related point, 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 (Esoteric and custom programming languages like solidity, plutus etc).
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 tendency to have very concentrated ownership structures, These are both challenges that we aim to correct.
Weber: How does the CasperLabs team plan to tackle these issues to reach mass adoption?
let’s talk about some specific things we are doing!
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)
This is telling us that for blockchain to succeed it needs to cater to all developers and they have made their preferences for 1. broadly used and 2. well-supported programming languages very clear.
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
- Flexible payment code (Sender does not always have to pay)
- Weighted key management (You can create any kind of threshold system)
- Upgradeable contracts (Never lose control of your systems)
- Direct state querying (Easy data access)
Glad to go into detail on any of these.
Weber: Global technological transformation has further strengthened the demand for basic blockchain technology. There are many cross chain and alliance blockchain projects in the market. What do you think of the current public chain market? What are the advantages of CasperLabs in the field of public chain at this stage?
Cathy Zhu: we view ourselves as an infrastructure layer. Similar to Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure etc. We let application developers do whatever they choose to do. That being said we have included a huge amount of features that enable some pretty great use cases.
We are already in conversations with many large enterprises and startups, but I can talk about some the specific problems we are trying to solve (That have not been solved by block chain yet)
On adoption, the feedback we are receiving from businesses has been extremely positive. Our team has a background in professional software engineering for large SaaS companies, and they understand what software companies need in a technology platform. A lot of features on our platform have been created based on direct feedback from enterprises as well accumulated knowledge on the team.
Weber: Do you think CasperLabs will be “Ethereum Killer”?
Cathy Zhu: Firstly I think the industry is in too early stages to have clear competition. The industry in general is under-penetrated and the ethos is to be helpful to each other. I’d say we are closest in beliefs to ethereum in that we believe is a fully open and decentralized system.
We are very similar in terms of ethos. We are a fully permissionless and highly secure protocol so in that sense as smart contracting platforms we are most similar to ethereum. And in many ways we are implementing the ethereum 3.0 roadmap
In terms of differences. We will be a full scalable PoS system at launch (Estimated end of the year), Ethereum will continue to be a PoW/PoS hybrid for at least a few years. The first phases of Eth 2.0 are PoW/PoS hybrids. In addition we have embraced open programming standards right out the gate, the Ethereum shift to open programming standards will be a few phases out
In addition the two features I described (flexible payment code and weighted key management) and several more like CI/CD are unique to our protocol and are not yet on the ethereum development timeline.
Weber: The purpose of CasperLabs is to build a revolutionary blockchain platform for all applications that need advanced security protection. So how does CasperLabs protect assets and data security on a completely decentralized public chain platform?
Cathy Zhu: 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.
Weber: From the perspective of the market, do we need such a large number of public chains in the future? Do you think a lot of different public chains will affect ecological efficiency?
In my opinion only 2 tectonic shifts (Big moments!) have happened in our industry
1. First tectonic shift Nakamoto consensus (Used in Bitcoin) created the digital asset. It’s not just about money and currency it is also the best form of copy protection we have ever seen.
2. Second tectonic shift was the birth of smart contracting as proposed by ethereum. Now we could also make money programmable
The third tectonic shift (Or Blockchain 3.0) will happen once blockchain technology scales throughput, security and adoption. Unfortunately this has not happened yet because most attempts to scale have sacrificed true decentralization and security.
I think there are a lot of protocols coming out. My view is that the ones that try to create something without compromising security or decentralization are the ones that will create long term value. In the short term everything is speculative, but the real prize is when you build something that can withstand any attack and any form of control.
Weber: What is your timeline, and what can we look forward to from CasperLabs?
Cathy Zhu: 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.
We launched our mainnet at the end of March.
Right from the beginning CasperLabs has been built as a platform to help bring developers and communities together to build whatever their imaginations want to. We aim to be open infrastructure similar to AWS and enable developers and entrepreneurs to run the applications, data and contracts as they choose. . CasperLabs is purpose built to give people easy to use tools and technologies to let their imaginations fly. As an industry we all have a lot to do. Lets get building!
Weber: Since we have co-hosted CASPER Roadshow recently, do you have any plan to deepen our cooperation relationship?
Cathy Zhu: XT.com is one of our partners when we launched the EVO private sale before. And XT is also our co-host for Casper China Roadshow. XT.com has been an amazing and very supportive partner of Casper. We really value of the partnership with XT.com. We are really appreciate all the support and help XT.com has given to us. We are looking forward more collaboration with XT.com in the future and also looking forward to know XT.com community more.
Weber: Anything else do you want to share with our community?
Cathy Zhu: We are pleased with the initial community interest in the underlying technology but I will state again that we are just getting started. We will continue to engage deeply with communities and as the restrictions open up, we aim for a lot of in person events, hackathons and much much more which should see these trends accelerate even more. The next focus of CasperLabs is working on Casper ecosystem and partnerships including enterprise relations. There are a lot of really good news coming soon. Please stay tuned. You may join Casper telegram group to get the latest and greatest update from Casper https://t.me/casperblockchain.
Weber: Thank you, Cathy, for taking the time to do this AMA with us today. It has been great learning more about CasperLabs and the team behind it! it’s great to have such a wonderful cooperation with CasperLabs. Looking forward to our further cooperation.
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