Ethereum [ETH] 2.0 Casper and Sharding client Prysm released by developers

On 3rd October, Prysmatic Labs, a team of developers committed to scaling Ethereum [ETH], announced the release of the first demo version of their Ethereum 2.0 Shasper [Sharding plus Casper] project, Prysm. In a Medium post, the team briefly explained the features included in the release and the roadmap for the future.

The announcement read:

“We are proud to announce our very first release of Prysm, v0.0.0, which will serve as the building block for all future releases as we get to production.”

Prysmatic Labs began their work on Ethereum 2.0 at the end of 2017 when Vitalik Buterin, the Co-Founder of Ethereum unveiled his vision for the next-generation Ethereum. Buterin addressed issues in the Ethereum blockchain and presented solutions for the future. The Co-Founder also began a thread on Ethereum’s official GitHub where all developers got together to tackle issues regarding the concept of sharding.

The team stated that this version will serve as a platform for a production-oriented release that is written in the Go programming language. Through this release, the team hopes to set a standard for the developments of ETH2.0.

They also explained why the release was being called “v0.0.0” instead of “v0.0.1.” They said:

“There is still work to be done with respect to wrapping up Phase 0 of Shasper, but we wanted to give the community a taste of what a real client will look like.”

Version 0.0.0 includes a basic beacon chain with a validator demo. The beacon chain along with the validator demo will be able to sign up a beacon chain node from a genesis configuration. A validator client can be connected to the beacon node through a Remote Procedure Call [RPC].

Furthermore, they stated that the version includes a Casper FFG reward/penalty mechanism. It also includes a basic, locally networked P2P [Peer to Peer]. The version comes embedded with a simulator of beacon blocks. The locally networked P2P can be used to sync the incoming block of the beacon chain.

Moreover, the team stated that the release includes a popularly used scalable build system known as Bazel. Industry giants like Google, Pinterest, Dropbox also use Bazel.

Along with the above-mentioned features, many others have been integrated with this release. Although many features have been embedded in the demo, the team stated that features like the validator rotation, withdrawals, dynasty transitions, and several others have not been included.

Future releases will include work on the randomness generation and signature aggregation on the beacon chain and validator rotation, they added.

Displaying his interest in seeing how the demo works, Vitalik Buterin, tweeted:

“Excited to be trying out @prylabs’s first PoC”

Responding to Buterin’s tweet, Raul Jordan developer at PryLabs said:

“Try adding ‘–verbosity debug’ to the beacon chain to see what it’s doing underneath the hood.”