What Is Ethereum Casper Protocol?

By Kapil Gauhar

If you are interested in selling Ethereum or any other cryptocurrency in general, then you must have heard of the terms Proof of Stake and Ethereum Casper. There is no running from such terms because they are everywhere now. Since there is so much data out there, anyone who is interested in the topic can go overwhelmed. But it’s not the case with this guide. Continue reading…

Entering Ethereum Casper

Casper is the Proof of Stake (PoS) protocol that Ethereum has opted for to go with. Since there’s been a whole team busy creating it, Vlad Zamfir is usually credited for being the “Face of Casper”.

It’s not hidden any more, Casper is designed to work in a trustless system. Also, it can be more Byzantine Fault Tolerant.

Anyone who acts maliciously will instantly get punished by having their stake slashed off immediately. This is where it varies from most other PoS protocols. Malicious acts have something to lose, so it’s impossible for them to be nothing at stake.

This isn’t the only place where Casper penalises the Validators.

“As Joris Bontje and Hudson James note in their answers in “StackExchange,” Casper designs harsher incentives to guarantee network security, including punishing miners who go offline, unintentionally or not.”

Now, this indicates that validators will need to be more careful about their node uptime. Laziness or carelessness will result in losing their stake. This property decreases censorship of the transactions as well as overall availability. Along with that, the slashing property also lends Casper a different edge over the standard Proof of Work protocols.

Casper isn’t just one specific project. It’s a combination of two research projects. Casper is currently being undertaken by the Ethereum dev team.

The two projects include –

• Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG)
• Casper the Friendly GHOST: Correct-by-Construction (CBC)

What’s The Need Of Ethereum Casper?

There are a number of benefits of implementing Proof of Stake. They can be widely listed down among the following categories –

1. Helpful in achieving decentralization
2. Energy Efficient
3. Economically secured
4. Offers to scale
5. Transition to PoS

Ethereum Casper Protocol’s Future

Vitalik Buterin recently said that not just is Casper ready for testing, but also it could offer a security boost at the time of testing code across clients. While it doesn’t look that it’s ready for the adoption everywhere, it still appears as the date of Casper testnet is coming closer, much closer.

It’s not a question that “if PoS is going to be implemented or not”. It’s the question of “When it’s going to be implemented”. Ethereum Serenity is supposed to be a PoS network. It’s not like that we have never seen the PoS implementation earlier. Peercoin is the example that implemented it successfully. However, no one has seen the adoption of the Ethereum Casper Protocol at this level before.

Perhaps, if Casper is successfully implemented, then the other Airdrops in cryptocurrencies may follow suit and make the transition in themselves too. Whatever is the case, Casper brings in a lot of enticing possibilities.