25 Feb Accelerating Dapps and Decentralized Economies with Metis and CasperLabs

Our partnership with CasperLabs to bring performance, scale, and security to decentralized applications, economies, and communities.

Today, we announced a partnership between Metis and CasperLabs to accelerate the development of decentralized applications, economies, and community-based projects.

Metis is a layer 2 open framework for the creation, management, and scale of DACs (Decentralized Autonomous Companies). Metis draws a nuanced distinction between DAOs and DACs, describing the latter as “a subclass” of DAOs. Whereas DAOs focus primarily on matters of governance, DACs are designed specifically to address day-to-day business operation and management. Metis is focused on building out sustainable, decentralized companies on top of performant layer 1 blockchains through their DAC framework.

Building on Casper

Metis built an MVP of their layer 2 platform on top of Ethereum, but quickly found themselves hindered by gas costs and network latency. Metis is choosing to build on Casper to leverage the network’s pure CBC-Casper solution and develop with “Ethereum 3.0.” Specifically, Metis is leveraging the following essential features of Casper:

Developer Friendly
Casper is built to support quick and familiar onboarding by existing developers. Instead of using a proprietary language like Solidity, Casper supports WebAssembly. There are nearly 30 million developers in the world. Casper is designed so that any of them can start building applications immediately with the tools and languages already familiar to them.

Simple Migration
CasperLabs has built a Solidity transpiler for the Casper network. The transpiler allows developers to “translate” Solidity into Rust instead of needing to build from scratch on Casper. For projects that find themselves built on Ethereum but frustrated with the network’s current latency (such as Metis), the transpiler allows for low-effort and swift migration onto Casper.

Safety, Liveness, Scale
Casper supports a flexible, scalable, and secure architecture that supports the nuances Metis needs as it continues to build its layer 2 solution. Upgradeable contracts allow teams to deploy Dapps without worrying about how to implement improvements in the future. Weighted keys enable unique and customizable solutions to access, identity, and permissioning. Lastly, flexible payment codes support a variety of payment schemes that DACs may want to adopt in the future, and allows dapp teams to pay for user transactions to accelerate user onboarding.

Governance
Casper enables on-chain governance facilitated by users’ reputation rather than just token accumulation. Reputation is gained through contribution to the community, whereas today’s governance tokens are often gained through capital expenditure only.

What’s Next for the Metis x Casper Partnership

The Casper network will enable Metis to build its layer 2 solution for decentralized companies and communities without worrying about the limitations of the underlying layer 1 protocol. Casper will free up the team to continue accelerating the creation and adoption of decentralized business.

Metis is enhancing the capabilities of the Casper network by establishing a layer 2 that can engage with incumbent and emerging Web2 and Web3 use cases, including DeFi, creator economies, OS projects, crowdfunding, and more.

In addition to the DAC solution, Metis and CasperLabs are collaborating to initiate a joint lab to accelerate the ecosystems of both projects. The lab will conduct research, marketing, and development to bring to market the unique capabilities of Metis x Casper — including industry reports, technology analyses, grants, events, trainings, workshops, hackathons, and more.

https://blog.casperlabs.io/accelerating-dapps-and-decentralized-economies-with-metis-and-casperlabs/