First Version of Ethereum's Casper Update Has Been Released

A new version of the code of Casper, a planned improvement to the Ethereum network's economic consensus protocol, has been released by developers May 8.On Tuesday, Danny Ryan, the developer of Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget, posted a Casper v0.1 "First Release" of the code on GitHub, admitting that "v0.1.0 marks us more clearly tagging releases to help clients and external auditors more easily track the contract and changes."

"More than just the research team is using the contract now - auditors, client devs, etc - so we wanted to start issuing clearer versioning and changelogs to help everyone stay organized."

Casper FFG was first published in October 2017, aiming to solve "Open questions of economic finality through validator deposits and crypto-economic incentives." In late April, the Ethereum Improvement Proposal #1011: Hybrid Casper FFG was introduced, with the purpose of creating a hybrid system of consensus that seeks to push the network away from issues associated with cryptocurrency mining.

The Hybrid Casper FFG will reportedly combine Proof-of-Work with Proof-of-Stake consensus, with the goal of eventually transitioning to PoS. According to the EIP, one of the specifications of the update reduces the block reward for miners to 0.6 ETH from the current 3 ETH..