CasperLabs Is Building a PoS Blockchain With Help from Ethereum’s Vlad Zamfir

A new startup called CasperLabs has launched with the aim of building a new blockchain based on a version of proof-of-stake (PoS), the experimental consensus protocol most associated with ethereum. Ethereum Foundation researcher Vlad Zamfir will serve as lead consensus protocol architect of the company, confirming earlier reports of his association with the startup. Going forward, CasperLabs plans to sponsor much of Zamfir’s research on PoS so as to deploy a “fully decentralized, sharded and scalable next-generation blockchain.”Zamfir further told CoinDesk he would be tasked with “producing protocol specifications” in his new role that would “support the [CasperLabs] team” in understanding the eventual technology created. Zamfir will not be coding the blockchain itself, and will be helping strictly as a researcher.One of a wide array of cryptocurrency consensus models designed to validate transactions without relying on proof-of-work mining (in which users solve computationally-intensive puzzles in order to append new blocks to the blockchain), PoS has arguably yet to see significant large-scale testing.Within PoS, there are even competing designs for how to implement the idea, but the one designed by Zamfir in the early days of ethereum is called Casper Correct by Construction (CBC).