Summary
The Casper node is a pure Proof of Stake blockchain node that implements Highway Consensus on top of a Turing complete Virtual machine with smart contracting capabilities for wasm smart contracts. A single node client has been developed in Rust that implements the protocol. Development on the node client commenced in June, 2019 with the VM and global state store.
The Testnet program started in March 2020 with a naive Casper blockchain with 30 community participants. Participation was extended to 50 participants in July. The final testnet phase (Delta) commenced in November, 2020 and concluded with the launch of mainnet. The Delta phase demonstrated the permissionless protocol and hosted over 600 active participants
The node is configured to include 2500 token transfers and 100 wasm (smart contract) deploys per block.
The Casper Association has requested and CasperLabs plans to present and recommend a software upgrade to network participants in the next 30 days. The goal of the upgrade is to increase the performance of the network.
Installing node from Scratch:
https://github.com/make-software/how-to-casperlabs/blob/master/docs/ubuntu/setup-validator-from-scratch.md