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Is Casper 2.0 the endgame?
Recorded: May 9, 2025 Duration: 1:01:01Space Recording
Short Summary
Casper Network has successfully launched its highly anticipated Casper 2.0 upgrade, introducing groundbreaking features such as a new consensus protocol, enhanced smart contract capabilities, and gasless transactions. These innovations are expected to drive significant growth and adoption in the blockchain space, positioning Casper as a leader in the Web3 ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hello, everyone.
We will start the show pretty soon, give or take five, not even five minutes, like one
or two minutes and we will start.
Michael, can you check your microphone before we start?
Can you hear me?
Yeah, we can hear you. All right's uh one one minute and we can start perfect Thank you.
I'm very happy to be here, very happy
to have Casper here again the second time this year, which I'm obviously very happy
with. Michael, how are you doing?
I'm doing pretty well. It's been a busy week, which I'm sure we'll talk about more, but
a super exciting week in the Casper ecosystem. How are
things in my my old home country of the Netherlands? Pretty good, pretty good. I
haven't been here the complete time when we were well compared with the last few
months we were speaking with. It's like I went to 2009 which was pretty cool um even though it's not necessarily my vibe
it's uh very dystopian to me right maybe i'm a bit um maybe i'm a bit too european for it i would
say i would say dubai is probably 180 degrees the opposite of what the Netherlands is from a culture perspective. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So I had to adapt to that.
Yeah, everything is that we are doing pretty well in the Netherlands. At least we haven't had
some rain lately, which is obviously pretty good because, well, the weather is pretty good lately.
It's like 20 degrees, 22 degrees right now.
Yeah, I'm pretty happy with that because honestly the weather in the Netherlands is so,
it's like, you could say it's like very similar
to the Bitcoin price.
It can go everywhere every day
and you never know what's coming up.
That's right.
Unlike where I live in Los Angeles, California,
where it's gonna be in the 30s this weekend
and we barely ever get any rain.
So after moving here from Amsterdam, it's very hard to leave that behind.
Yeah, I can see.
I absolutely can understand that.
Obviously, for the people which might not have heard about you, Michael,
could you give a small introduction about what you do, what you have done?
And more importantly, afterwards, obviously, we'll talk a bit more about Casper and other great stuff.
But if you can do a little bit of a personal introduction, that would be awesome.
Sure. So I'm the CTO and the president of the board of the Casper Association, which is the nonprofit that helps support and grow the Casper network.
that helps support and grow the Casper network.
And I've been in this role since last year,
but I was an original co-founder of the Casper project
all the way back in 2018, which is quite a while ago now.
And since you asked sort of about how I got here,
I'll give you a quick background or so as your listeners
will have just concluded.
I'm originally from Amsterdam, the Netherlands.lands uh so uh we uh we share that uh derek um why i actually i don't think you're
from amsterdam right where are you uh well well yeah i'm from base but that is now it's called
it's part of amsterdam so you could say i'm part of Amsterdam, but yeah. So it's about 30 minutes outside, right?
Yeah, like 50 minutes with the car.
There you go.
So I started out in Amsterdam, actually, in the early e-commerce industry in the mid-90s.
And I guess we called it the Web1 period.
And I ran some of the earliest e-commerce companies in the Netherlands.
And then by the late 90s, I moved into mobile technology.
And if you were around back then, mobile technology in the 90s was mostly like premium SMS applications.
So I'd like text ABC to 123 and get your horoscope for 99 cents a pop.
So I was in mobile technology for quite a while.
We rolled out a pan-European premium SMS network
and built applications for all those large media
companies and things like that.
And then as networks and devices improved,
so did the applications that we were trying to develop.
And I brought sort of the mobile web from Japan to Europe,
something called iMode at the time,
sort of a predecessor of the mobile web.
And then in 2001, when mobile devices became more powerful,
I joined THQ, which was one of the largest, I think,
top three video game publishers at the time globally, as their CTO for mobile. And we put
the first downloadable mobile games on cell phones, which sort of really started the mobile
gaming industry and the subsequent app economy. And then I stayed in mobile and later social
gaming, moved to Los Angeles, California, where I'm still based, and sort of participated in the early Web2 transition that got started towards the end of the 2000s.
And then by around 2012, 2013, my gaming work really started to overlap with the Web3 world, the early Web3 world.
I was based or working out of Santa Monica, California,
which is colloquially referred to as Silicon Beach.
And a lot of the early Web3 projects were founded there.
So like even projects like Tether were in fact founded
in our meeting room at our office in Santa Monica.
So I was pretty closely involved as a technical advisor
to many of these projects and their investors, while still being the CTO of this social gaming company.
And when we sold that company in 2016, my part-time focus on Web3 became a full-time obsession.
obsession. And that's, as they say, the rest is history. And then in 2018, my partners and I
And that's, as they say, the rest is history.
co-founded the Casper Project with the intention of bringing an enterprise-level proof-of-stake
network into existence. And that's how we got here.
That's pretty interesting. And I can remember this story. And I can remember
that the last time we have talked actually about the SMS premium services, considering these were pretty huge back in the day.
It was like, you saw them everywhere.
I can remember every morning when, because obviously I was a lot younger, so I think I still...
So was that.
True, true.
I was actual like primary school maybe or maybe beginning high
school and i can i can remember that every morning you would see like jamba you would see all these
premium sms services with their um yeah with their um essentially with their services what they yeah
it's like hey it's interesting we actually powered jamba so. So we were the backend, the network that they used to basically interact with the cell phone networks.
Oh, really? That's actually interesting.
I can remember that went vividly, considering these commercials were everywhere and it was nowhere.
You couldn't essentially turn on the TV, specifically in the morning, considering they were obviously targeted to kids,
for the most part,
without seeing these commercials.
That's actually interesting.
It's pretty cool to meet someone
which actually was part of that era,
considering it was an era, I would say,
with a lot of money in folds,
considering these commercials were not cheap.
They certainly were not.
And yeah, you can sort of figure it out quickly, right?
Like these things went for a dollar or a euro,
or at the time, I guess, gilders per message.
And it adds up quickly.
So you do a TV ad and you get a decent response.
It's a pretty good return on your 15 second TV spot.
Yeah, that's cool.
And I'm wondering, what made you start your own network?
What made you start Casper in the sense of,
what essentially pushed you over the edge
to make something yourself instead of maybe making a D app
on any other ecosystem which is obviously already out there,
like maybe Ethereum, for example?
Sure. So what we saw,
and perhaps we were a little early with it,
is that the Web3 space was very insular, right?
And I think up till relatively recently
that that's remained the case,
where the solutions and the technologies that were being developed
were mainly developed to sort of service the Web3 space itself, right?
Like, how can we sort of do the next sort of shiny thing
that's like DGENs-like?
And it doesn't matter if we move fast and break things, right?
Like as Mark Zuckerberg used to say,
because there's nothing nothing real at stake.
And we believe that ultimately this blockchain technology,
distributed ledger technology, has massive potential for the real world
and real sort of real world applications,
where you have to deal with sort of existing companies,
with governments, with regulations,
with jurisdictions, with processes that have been around for decades.
And they're not going to move fast and break things. They're not going to retrain their thousands of software engineers
from their traditional programming languages onto Solidity
solidity or something else obscure that a few thousand people in the world know.
or something else obscure that a few thousand people in the world know.
They're not going to develop software without testing capabilities, without deployment pipelines,
but with all those things, right?
So we believe that in order for blockchain to start to integrate with the real world,
there had to be a blockchain solution that basically met the real world where it is,
which is care about sort of software
development best practices, care about accessibility for developers, care about all the things that
a business cares about, which is maintaining software for years or decades in some cases,
right? And being able to upgrade it as regulations evolve and being able to mirror restrictions
and processes that you have in your real-world company,
like being able to have access rights to your software, right?
Like if you have a financial software program,
the CFO is not allowed or basically is allowed to do a lot more things
than the accountant is or the marketing person, right? So like those things didn't exist in blockchain platforms. And we
believe that they're in order for blockchain to become relevant outside of its own sandbox,
those had to come into existence. That makes sense. And obviously,
this whole space is about Gaspar 2.0 however to set its foundation and essentially
also letting the audience also give a bit of an idea hey we're transitioning from casper one to
casper two we have to understand what casper one is to begin with right so can you give us a bit of
an idea what that is and then we can transition to the differences the changes and more importantly
why these changes will be there.
So, I mean, Casper 1, I sort of described the premise right here, and Casper 2 basically builds on top of that.
So maybe what's helpful also for your audience is just to point out that Casper 2.0 launched on Mainnet just three days ago on Tuesday.
So when you asked me how I was doing at the beginning and I said it was a pretty busy week, I mean that's why. It's been a pretty busy week with a major launch and then obviously
everything that followed since. So we're extremely happy with all the momentum and feedback we're
getting out of the markets. But it's been a major launch for us
that's been literally years in the making.
But I'd love to just describe sort of what Casper 2 is
in order not to sort of confuse everybody
and focus on what's out there versus what was out there,
because that's what we're building on now.
If that's okay with you, Dieterich.
Absolutely.
So let me walk you through some of the things that Casper 2.0 introduces.
So first of all, we launched a new consensus protocol.
So Casper, as I mentioned earlier, is a proof-of-stake protocol.
It's built on the original Casper white paper that sort of a first iteration of a Casper-based
proof-of-stake blockchain.
And that protocol, as we called it,
was called Highway.
And ZOOC is sort of the next version of that,
or actually not, it's really a full replacement.
And one of the primary sort of properties of it is deterministic finality.
And we can talk about that a little bit more later if you want.
But what that means is, and for those of you who are familiar with consensus on other blockchains,
which at least as a user, many of you will be, because if you use Bitcoin or Ethereum
and many other layer ones and layer twos, they use something that's called probabilistic finality, right?
So in those systems, when a block is added to the chain, it's not finalized immediately.
It's basically the longer you wait, the more likely it is that it won't get dropped or replaced,
right? It's sort of probable. That's why it's called probabilistic.
So that's why when you send tokens to an exchange,
it doesn't sort of become tradable immediately
or available to you immediately in the account.
It shows up as, well, waiting for X many confirmations.
Like with Ethereum, they typically
wait for like 64 confirmations or something.
And that is something that might be acceptable for crypto native use cases,
but it's really not ideal when certainty really matters.
So ZOOC, our new consensus protocol, has deterministic finality,
which means that the moment a block is produced by the network,
it's instantly final and instantly permanent.
So that's pretty important because if you're, for example,
selling your home or you're doing a large real estate deal,
you don't want to wait for 64 confirmations to know
whether it's truly sold or not.
And ZOOC eliminates that uncertainty.
So that's a big deal, as I mentioned, in real estate.
It's a big deal in financial transactions,
regulated asset transfers, legal agreements,
basically anywhere where ambiguity can create risk.
So that's one of the things with ZOOC
and the consensus protocol.
Casper 2.0 also builds on this concept of built-in access
controls, which allows developers to define roles
and permissions directly within their smart contracts at the protocol level.
So instead of reinventing that logic each time
or building workarounds, as we've
seen in other protocols, it's handled natively.
So in the real world, as I gave that example before,
you have governance requirements in a company or in a project. Somebody who's
in the C-suite has different rights than somebody who works in marketing. And Casper allows
you to basically embed those rules directly into your smart contracts and then the network
on the protocol level enforces them. Another thing that I alluded to is smart contract
upgradability. So Casper allows contracts to evolve without having to redeploy them entirely and migrating user data.
So this is, again, something that is critical in the real world, where business logic and regulations change all the time, right?
So being able to update a contract transparently and securely without disruption is a big advantage for real-world use cases.
We also introduced a multi-VM architecture,
which means that different virtual machines can now run
side by side on the same layer one network.
So unlike other environments where there may be different
sort of execution engines, those are typically
either side chains or roll-ups or layer twos.
In Casper's case, these are fully integrated VMs
that can interact with each other and allow applications
with different needs to operate natively
within the same environment on the same layer one.
And finally, this has always been a big focus for us,
is developer accessibility.
So we talked about how in the Web3 world where obscure programming languages
like Solidity are sort of the norm, there are maybe about 20,000 or so developers who are
fluent in these specialized languages like Solidity. But the real world, if you go out to
companies that employ actual software engineers, there are tens of millions of engineers who know mainstream tools and languages.
And you're not going to retrain those or hire new Solidity developers.
You want to use your existing engineering base.
So Casper is built on WebAssembly, and we support smart contract development in, for example, Rust, but WebAssembly
can be compiled to from any mainstream language. So we're targeting those tens of millions of
software engineers versus the few thousands who are familiar with sort of the Web3 sandbox
languages. And for that, we also provide SDKs in languages like JavaScript and Go and .NET and all the sort of popular languages.
So for us, really, Casper 2.0 isn't just a protocol upgrade.
It's really a step towards making blockchain infrastructure viable for long-term real-world systems
that require secure and adaptable and understandable development and processes.
Interesting. I think there's, well, I would say there's five major updates
and let's discuss them one by one.
Let's discuss the probability first, considering I think that's one
which is very pretty big, considering that would mean that you would have
near instant finality, right?
Correct. So, go ahead. would mean that you would have near instant finality right um correct um so okay thanks i appreciate you um so one thing one thing that sounds pretty good i mean let's be fair it sounds
insane because all of a sudden um specifically for deeper application this is a big thing why
is because hey as a default application specifically for example, for example you have some market makers involved in anything in the
DeFi, they are able to have significantly less risk considering not all of a
sudden they don't have to wait for example 10 or 15 seconds until the
transaction is done, now it's instant. Which is great, obviously it's great and
also from user experience awesome because all of a sudden you you have your uh transaction or your swap or your net whatever
you are lending or maybe you're on a on or club decks and do like something like a limit order
or market order it's instantly in your wallet um the point my question would be that sounds pretty
pretty cool sounds very interesting but how would it work from a security uh sense considering obviously the probability probability um probability finality is probably probabilistic
for that excuse me um the reason why it's probabilistic is only out of security reasons
to make sure hey these transactions don't final so how do we ensure after one second there are
essentially already like final and you are so, all right, these transactions are valid.
So a couple of things.
So first of all, you say it's interesting for DeFi
and you're describing a use case and you're right.
It's interesting and what you're describing
is basically user convenience, right?
Like things might go faster
and you can be more confident about it sooner.
But that I think is not the main advantage.
The main advantage is really outside of DeFi or basically in the real world, where this concept of probabilistic finality doesn't exist.
When you sell an asset, it either belongs to the seller or the buyer.
it either belongs to the seller or the buyer.
There is no such thing as living in limbo for whether it's a minute,
10 minutes, or an hour, which may be the case with Bitcoin, right?
Where nobody knows who owns the assets and whether the transaction will go
through and end up being the buyer's assets at the end of it,
or maybe it goes back to the seller, right?
That just isn't a thing.
So if you want to implement real-world use cases, you're going to have to mirror what
the real world, sort of how it operates, and that is pretty atomic.
At one point, it belongs to the seller, and the next point, it belongs to the buyer.
This limbo situation is not something that's acceptable out there in the real world.
both situations, not something that's acceptable out there
in the real world.
And the security thing is it doesn't actually
work the way that you describe it.
So the reason why these confirmations are a thing
is because in probabilistic consensus,
you have the concept of reorgs and rewrites.
So that is something that doesn't exist in Casper.
Like I mentioned, when a block is added to the chain,
it cannot be reorged or rewritten or sort of superseded.
It's a serial process where once it's added, it never goes back.
That's what makes it final.
So from a security perspective,
the idea that you can 10 minutes from now or 10 blocks from now basically have a rework
and that erases sort of the history from the blockchain
or changes the history from the blockchain,
that just doesn't exist in Casper.
That's the difference between deterministic
and probabilistic consensus.
Awesome, I think that makes a lot of sense.
And another thing, the second point you're talking about
was, hey, we essentially allow you to set up roles
whereby certain roles will have more access,
essentially have more access or more power essentially
than other roles whereby let's say you are,
let's say you are a senior developer,
you're a junior developer,
or the junior developer might not have as much of access
as the senior developer and vice versa.
So one thing I'm wondering about is you said,
well, this is something which is very normal in Web2 development.
And for me, that sounds very surprising, like in the sense of if it's so normal and so normalized in Web2 development, why is that not a thing yet in Web3?
It's maybe a bit of a broad question, but I'm wondering if it's such a normalized thing, why is it not a thing in Web3 right now?
I can ask that about a lot of things, right?
But it's just in Web3, as I mentioned earlier, I think we've as an industry just been very focused on sort of a very sort of narrow set of use cases where it wasn't necessarily required.
But I don't know how familiar you are with smart contract development.
There are obviously many smart contracts implement a wonky access control system.
They'll designate an admin wallet or something like that that can make some changes.
And then that's always a custom a custom implementation of like in the smart contract itself,
I'm going to register a specific address and that address is the admin and they can do X or Y
and they can withdraw money from the contract, for example.
But then obviously we've seen many, many times
that these things are super vulnerable.
If you have an admin wallet embedded in the contract,
and for some bug or reason, you get to overwrite what
that address is, now all of a sudden somebody else has it.
Or maybe you protected the methods
that only the admin is allowed to perform,
but you didn't protect
the setting or changing of the admin address properly.
There's a lot of these scenarios.
If you go back to a lot of the hacks, you'll find that this is one of the big vulnerabilities
in contracts.
And it's a responsibility that you don't necessarily want to put on the smart contract
developer because you want them to focus on implementing the actual functionality
that they're interested in.
So what Casper provides is this ability
to set these roles and use a system that's
built into the protocol, where essentially each contract
entry point, and an entry point is really just
like a method that you call.
If you have, let's say, an ERC-20 contract,
there's a transfer method on it, for example, or Mint or whatever. And in the metadata of that method, you said which groups,
which roles are allowed to call it. And then it's natively enforced by the protocol so that somebody,
an address or a user that doesn't sit in that role, in that group, just cannot call it,
and it throws a system error rather than asking the smart contract developer to implement something that enforces that.
And the nice thing here is, like I said before, this helps mirror sort of real-world constraints,
and it also creates interesting governance opportunities.
So if you combine some
of these features, so I'll give you sort of a practical example, because I'm sure we'll talk
about like upgradability as well in a little bit. If you combine three of these features,
you have smart contract upgradability, you can define roles and access rights. And then Casper,
and I didn't even mention it, this also has built-in protocol-level multi-signature support.
So if you combine those things,
you can come up with, for example,
a sort of contract upgrade governance system
that uses purely native functionality
where a contract can only be upgraded
by people in a specific role,
let's say the C-suite of a project,
and then use multi-signature natively,
where you need to reach consensus,
where three out of five of the C-suite executives
need to agree that the upgrade happens,
otherwise it doesn't happen.
So now you can actually have some real controls
around how your application runs on-chain
and have it mirror the
restrictions and processes and approval flows, et cetera,
that you have in your real world.
It's pretty interesting that like, because it seems to me,
it seems like a no brainer to implement this specifically from a security perspective but also
from just uh essentially from a business perspective it makes a lot of sense considering
you made a really good point to say hey you might not want that everyone has the same access
and obviously you do not want that um it's pretty interesting that it seems that
It's pretty interesting that it seems that, and I think this is also a good bridge to my next point,
is I think one thing we do quite a bit in Web3 is we try to reinvent the wheel.
And sometimes that's okay.
Sometimes it's all right.
You try to reinvent the wheel, considering the current wheel is a square.
considering the current wheels is a square, so it doesn't work, sure.
So it doesn't work, sure.
But it doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense to reinvent the wheel,
also programming language wise, considering it seems that we are shooting
ourselves a little bit in the foot.
It seems that we are essentially hampering ourselves with an industry with the
numbers, which is that, Hey, there's around 20 000 um active developers which is actually
true um it's around 22 i think but it's not even a lot of people think that's still time
i'm glad that you're not calling me a liar but the thing is it's even but it's even worse it's
even worse uh in the sense of um like it's around 20 000 i think maybe 22 000 doesn't necessarily matter but it's not full
time these are like 8 000 or something are actually full time which is and so there's full time and
then there's also this level of expertise right like there's a lot of people who have dabbled in
solidity and call themselves a solidity developer but like how many of them are actually coming from
a true sort true software engineering background
and have a CS degree and know how to build enterprise-grade software?
I would argue that's probably maybe maximum a few thousand.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I'm sure you're familiar with Stack Overflow, right?
It's a very popular software development engineering
as a form product that's been around probably
for a couple of decades at this point.
They do this annual developer survey
where they ask developers all kinds of survey questions.
And one of them is always like, what
are the programming languages that you know?
And if you go on there, languages like Rust always
rank within the top five, six, whatever it may be, every year.
And Solidity, you have to scroll down,
I think, four times below the fold or something
to even see it register as a blip on the radar,
because it's just not a mainstream language. So if you want
to address really the mainstream real companies, real software engineers, people who know how to
build software with the processes and methodologies that we as a software industry have now developed
for the better part of half a century, that's where it's at.
Like it's in sort of those mainstream solid,
well-known, well-developed programming languages.
And those are the engineers that you'll
find at companies that operate out there outside of our Web3
sandbox.
And that's where we all want to see blockchain grow into.
It's time to sort of break out of the sandbox
and sort of enter the real world.
And obviously with Casper, Tubano,
you guys are able to provide these,
actually provide a platform to, well,
the bigger share of the pie.
Because, hey, you guys do essentially allow for WebAssembly,
which essentially compels in most popular languages.
The question is, I would say the fundament is there.
Now the question is,
how do you guys tend to attract the web tool developers,
considering it has been also for other blockchains,
competing blockchains even,
which also some of them actually allow you to copel in WebAssembly,
it's for them very hard to attract web-to-developers.
What's your vision on that?
So we'll talk about a few things.
So first of all, I think we're right now at the precipice of this transition.
So I think blockchain has been around for about 15 years.
And smart contracts with the launch of Ethereum,
let's say just over a decade.
This first phase of our industry
has really just been focused on that internal sandbox
approach of, let's just make blockchain apps for blockchain, right?
So I think we're now in the precipice of this breakout.
You see it more and more.
You see, obviously, like over the last year
and certainly with the changes in the United States
and all the institutional interest that's happening
and people changing their approach to what they can
and can put on their balance sheet, for example.
And you're finally seeing some real, real interest
coming out of the non-Web3 worlds in blockchain technology
and blockchain assets.
So this is, I think, the beginning of that process.
Well, I mean, just think about it, just if you think about it, just from an asset size perspective.
Right. So the entire blockchain industry, all assets combined, I would have to check CoinMarketCap, but I think it's somewhere around three trillion dollars.
Right. If you if you add up sort of all the market values. That's a tiny, tiny asset compared to real estate,
which is, I think, close.
I don't even know what the name of the number is above 999 trillion,
but is it a quadrillion or something?
It's infinitely larger.
We're just scratching the surface.
And it's about providing the right solutions at the right time.
I think the time is now.
I think we have the right solutions.
And we're working on getting those out there into the real world.
And we'll be launching here with partners that we'll announce here in the very near future
on some real-world applications that
will prove that you can attract traditional companies,
traditional software engineers from the Web 2 world
and have them integrate Web 3 into their real-world workflows
and processes and businesses.
That's very interesting. I mean, that's already, I wouldn't say alpha, but a little bit of alpha.
We will see some partners coming up. One thing I'm wondering about, is this like real world
tokenization, considering, hey, you are talking about real estate? That's part of it. So I think
You were talking about real estate?
That's part of it.
So I think there's a couple obvious things here.
So real world asset tokenization,
and I think that's something that's really accelerating now
as you see across the industry.
And that is a perfect, I mean, perfect.
That's a very suitable use case, right?
Because especially for Casper
with the things that I described,
if you think about real estate,
like ownership is never something that is straightforward.
Like obviously you're dealing with a buyer and a seller,
but in a transaction around real estate,
there are always other parties involved.
Like you have realtors, agents, title companies, regulators,
the tax authorities always involved.
Somehow they always find a way of getting their involvement included, right?
So you have all these different parties,
and they all have their own rules and processes and regulations.
And you need to represent not just the assets, but you need to be able to capture those rules and processes as well.
So that's where we believe that we can play a role that's different than just taking a real estate asset and turning it into a token.
But then having that token also comply with what I described, with access controls, with governance,
with auditability and regulations, et cetera.
And when the regulations evolve, you
need to be able to upgrade those tokens
and have them represent the new regulations.
So especially in the current political climate,
these things change pretty rapidly.
And certainly from a jurisdiction perspective, they can be very different.
So you need to have that flexibility.
And that's something where we believe we can play a big role in.
So yes, real world asset tokenization is a top priority.
But other aspects of the real world environment are as well.
Compliance and regulatory compliance and tracking and things like that are use cases that industry as a whole copes with on a daily basis
and where solid solutions that can evolve and sort of mirror
sort of the real world needs
that provide better transparency and better auditability
and things like that are going to be making a meaningful impact.
And we believe that blockchain and Casper in particular
are what is going to be able to provide that meaningful impact.
Awesome.
And I'm wondering, we have spoken about developer
accessibility.
We have spoken about making it easier for them
to essentially make the app specifically, hey, all of a sudden,
you do not have to learn Solidity anymore,
but you can just start with your most languages you might
already have learned, which obviously increases developer accessibility by a ton.
And you also said, hey, we will also make some SDKs, right?
So essentially make it even easier for them to come on
and just try to start out to just,
hey, I want to make something,
hey, here's the SDK and just try it out,
which is I think the best way to essentially get in contact
or get
your first touch with blockchain. Will there also be like in benefits or well not many benefits,
improvement, that's the word I was looking for, improvements from a user accessibility?
Yeah listen that's I think part of why blockchain is still where it is, right?
So if you think about the user experience that we've seen and that we still work with in blockchain,
like, I don't know about your parents, but my parents are never going to be able to use Adapt the way that we can, right? Because downloadable wallets with 24-word recovery phrases
and the whole sort of the user interface
is just, well, abhorrent, to put it mildly.
So I think there's a lot of things
that are happening in that space that
make things more accessible.
And that's going to continue to have to happen, right?
So ultimately, I mean, just going back to, like we were talking at the beginning about sort of the early days of mobile, right?
So back in those days, as you might remember, people actually knew about the technology that they were using, right?
Like we had discussions about whether you were on GSM or on CDMA, and whether you're on 1G, 2G, 2.5G, GPRS, Edge, etc.
And that was sort of the beginning of the technology adoption phase
when it was people like you and me probably who knew this stuff.
But ultimately, the goal that was achieved in that industry
is that nobody has a clue of what they're using.
It's just they expect it to work.
And all this technology sits in the background and just makes it so that it works.
And at this point, I think very few of us know what protocol we're using on our phone.
And when you go to the supermarket supermarket when you pay for your groceries you
don't know which uh payment network your transaction goes over right so blockchain needs to get past
that point of being about well it's it's such and such protocol you need to have 12 24 or no
recovery words uh etc etc and move past the technology and get into product market fit and usability
where it becomes something that runs in the background
and enables real user applications for the mainstream.
And that's certainly something that we at Casper
are strong believers in.
From a product development perspective,
we do a lot on sort of our client libraries
to make it so that you can develop dApps that
are as seamless as possible.
We have this library called Casper Click,
which is a wrapper around all the supported wallets.
It allows you to sign in with social logins as well,
so that you basically take all the complexity of wallet setup and onboarding away from users.
Because again, my parents and probably yours
are not going to download MetaMask or set up a ledger
with a USB cable and all that.
They just want to go to an application
and click the sign in with Google button
like they do everywhere else and get going within two seconds because nobody has the patience to deal with all this nonsense.
So that's where we're going.
Absolutely.
I do agree.
I think with blockchain, we are at a sort of crossroads where we have to choose whether we want to stay in this sort of techy fight. We say, hey, we are all developers and everything is made for developers,
considering that's currently how it is.
Or we say, hey, no, we're actually going to the web tool world.
We try and go into Attractive Masters.
And then it has to be as easy as downloading an application on your phone.
Because that's what people are familiar with right
I mean the one thing which I kind of love about crypto is we all we all talking about yeah we
can we can very fast move money from A to B and it is true but to go there to go actually to
arrive at E at all is pretty hard for a lot of people. Whereby with the bank it's much easier.
And it's been working for 100 plus years, right? So and nobody like it's like we are like saying
you can really fast move money from A to B. But average Joe on the street just wants to like go
on their online banking and send their wire or send their thing, right? And they don't care about
how it happens in the background.
So we need to get to that point where people just expect things to work.
And blockchain just needs to be the better solution for it
in probably not even all cases, but in many cases, right?
And that's where the real value gets provided.
Not in, like I said, the techie vibe
where we convince the same techie people that sort of move
around from project to project that for the next two three months this protocol or this project or
this implementation is better and then something shinier comes along and they move you know like
that that's just not sustainable like it's about providing real solutions for real problems out
there in the real world absolutely and unfortunately And unfortunately, that's currently how crypto works and blockchain works.
They go from one shiny thing to another shiny thing.
And the thing is, if you look under the hood of many layer ones, layer twos, there are
a lot of similarities.
A lot of similarities.
Obviously, they are not all the same, not at all.
That's not what I'm trying to apply here. But it's not necessarily the new shiny thing is completely new and he puts blockchain
up on his uh up on his toes or whatever no it's most of the times it's like yeah they might have
changed here a few parameters and that's about it um and i'm not saying that's bad not at all
considering again you don't have to reinvent the wheel but it should be nice it would be probably pretty good if we move away from um we need 120 million tps and instead look into hey
how do we attract new users we actually fill these blocks or fill and do actual transactions we are
looking at it's it's about utility in the end right right? Like what's, like, yeah. And I'm wondering, can we also see with Casper,
Casper, wow, Casper.
Can we also see with Casper like gas stations
whereby, for example, users do not necessarily
have to pay gas fees considering,
hey, developers already have done it for them?
It's a very good question. So it's a yes-ish because it's not really gas stations,
but we have a couple of features in that area
that are actually part of the 2.0 code base,
but they haven't been activated on mainnet yet.
So I'll describe what they are.
So we have a concept called essentially gasless transactions.
They're not technically gasless, the way that it works.
It's essentially as a Dapp developer or a user,
instead of paying a gas fee and it leaves your account
and it's essentially an expense,
there is a hold that gets placed on the gas
because you still need gas from a security perspective, right?
And to pay for the resources for the execution of your transactions.
But you don't need to necessarily withdraw it from a user.
So what we're doing is there is a halt on the gas,
and then after a period of time, that halt gets released.
So essentially, it comes back to the user.
So it's an effectively free transaction
with a temporary halt.
So what this does, it does provide the security
that's necessary for the network,
but it makes transactions essentially free.
The nice thing about this is as a developer, as a DApp project,
rather than having to predict how much running your application is going to cost you
month to month or week to week or whatever the case may be,
and track it as an actual expense, which it is.
If you pay gas fees and it doesn't come back, then it's an expense and it sort of leaves
your treasury.
Now, all you need to do is sort of predict, sort of, it goes from OPEX, operating expenses
to capital expenses, right?
Because it's essentially you're locking up some of your capital for a period of time.
It comes back over a set period of time. And that's sort of a rotating process.
So essentially, you need to calculate the maximum amount of capital
that you need to run your application.
But it's a CapEx expense that's essentially, sorry, not an expense.
It's a CapEx item that doesn't cost you anything in the end,
which is really what enables companies now
to be able to run applications and essentially
forecast for the first time what it will take to do so.
So that's one thing that's launching.
In the very near future, we're going
to make that subject to a governance vote,
because obviously changing the economics of the protocol
is something that the community should have a vote in or a voice in. And in addition to that, there is a concept called
the contract and account unification or merge, which is similar to or sort of akin to account
abstraction in a way, where contracts can act as accounts and accounts can act as
contracts. And essentially that will allow dApps to pay for themselves as well. So that basically
moves the responsibility of paying for the gas directly into the dApp versus the user. And then
if you combine that with the hold
that I described, essentially free transactions,
it doesn't even cost the dApp anything over time.
So lots of interesting things happening there,
making it even more sort of easy to use for end users.
Because ultimately, if you have both of those things,
the dApp is essentially responsible for the gas holds.
Then as a user, you basically don't deal with gas anymore.
That's very cool.
I love that considering I truly think that we have to go through, I have to go to like
a blockchain world for buying.
You don't have to, there's two things you don't have to care anymore about, which is
one is bridging uh and the
second one is uh gas fees considering that would be the ideal world right that would be the world
whereby you essentially pictured before whereby a world whereby you could just come in you can do
whatever you want similarly how the internet works nowadays you just go to your website or
go to your d app or you go to your apps you do whatever whatever you want. You do not have to care which blockchain it is.
You do not have to care about, hey, I need Solana, I need Casper, I need like, I need to care.
Like the simplest example is always you go to the supermarket.
You don't know if they're on the Swift network, on the Visa network, on the MasterCard network, on the whatever network.
You just go and pay for groceries and that's, you don't spend like a microsecond thinking about it, right?
And that's where we need to get to absolutely absolutely and the account obstruction
is actually very interesting as well considering if i'm not if i'm not mistaken that was also part
of the latest ethereum um upgrade pectra um they also have like i think they also introduced some
accounted uh account obstruction functionalities, right?
There was an EIP that I think implemented part of what they're looking to do over time.
But I don't think it's fully implemented yet.
But they certainly made some progress with it as well.
Absolutely.
And I think that's a good thing.
I think it's good that everyone recognizes that we really have to go to a way more accessible world.
And besides the two massive upgrades, I would say, considering I'm really looking forward to, well, I think you could say interiorly gasless fees, gasless transactions, considering it's sort of
a gasless transaction.
You need some gas initially,
but you will essentially get it back.
So in that way,
you just need it once
and then you're fine.
You can just reuse it,
I would assume.
That's exactly right.
That's what I described.
It basically becomes a capital asset
versus an operating expense.
You have some of your Casper, in this case,
your currency that has a hold on it.
It stays within your account, so it means you can't move it out.
But it's there basically just to secure the transactions
that you're performing, but you still fully own it.
and it gets unlocked after a set period of time.
And it gets unlocked after a set period of time.
Obviously we are slowly but surely going to the end of spaces.
Is there any other, this might be a bit of an early question,
considering you guys obviously just have introduced a massive update to the Calf Spur,
but we're always fishing for new Al, we're also fishing for new needles.
So is there any other plant updates or plant upgrades,
which we can expect in the near future on Casper?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, I mean, obviously Casper 2.0 went live,
I think 72 hours ago or so.
First of all, we are super happy with how seamless that went
because this has been a major, major upgrade
that's been, as I mentioned, two years in the making.
Literally involved several hundreds of thousands
of lines of code that were added or modified
in the Casper Protocol software stack.
So from an engineering perspective,
and the engineering team really did something massive
that I'm super proud of and really impressed with our team.
And at the same time, launching such a massive protocol
upgrade on mainnet was a little stressful.
I mean, I can tell you that I didn't sleep very well the night
leading up to it.
Because no matter how many times we've tested it,
and obviously this upgrade has gone
through various test networks, both internal, and then we have a bunch of public test nets that it went through, as well as sort of ad hoc networks that we spin up on an almost daily basis.
with validator nodes that are spread all over the world,
running on different types of hardware,
sitting in different types of data centers,
with different types of latency and other configurations,
and maybe differently configured firewalls, et cetera, et cetera.
There's a lot of things that can go wrong.
And thankfully, nothing did.
It actually went as smoothly as we could imagine.
And also, this was the first time
that we see it sort of operating out there
in mainnet in the real world.
And obviously, we're very interested in the performance
metrics that we're seeing.
And we couldn't be any more encouraged.
So we've seen things like block finalization times
between the old consensus protocol, Highway, and the new consensus protocol, ZOOC,
improved by a factor 100 to 150x,
meaning that there is massive, massive room for throughput
on speed improvements on the new protocol.
So that's 2.0.
Like I said, it's been two years of development.
We're switching back to a three-month release cycle,
where every three months we want to release a minor upgrade.
So the next one is Casper 2.1.
And that will add a new virtual machine, so the second VM,
to run in parallel on our multi-VM architecture.
And that new VM will offer an even more simplified Rust-based
smart contract interface for developers.
It introduces new capabilities like self-describing smart
contracts, which can automatically
generate things like SDKs and
potentially even apps based on the contract metadata. And this is something that could
unlock a very interesting potential. Think about, for example, AI-based software development or
applications that dynamically spawn new contracts. So we're excited about that.
And as you sort of hinted at earlier,
we're looking forward to making some announcements
of projects coming on boards in the next weeks
that are making use of all this.
So it's really an exciting time for Casper Network.
JOHN MUELLER- Absolutely. And I'm pretty excited as well. I'm looking forward to the announcement,
looking forward to... And I do agree that a shorter development cycle might be a bit
better. Not necessarily because, hey, three months is better, but more for the community,
crypto communities. Not just for the community, I can tell you it's better for the engineering team as well.
Okay, okay, that's great because I know communities can be relentless.
Before we go, I would love to give you the last note here.
I would love to give you the last note in terms of maybe I have...
I'll ask you something or you would like to emphasize something.
This is your chance considering this is yours.
Oh, I appreciate that.
So, I mean, all I can say is I'm super grateful for our Casper community.
They've been incredibly supportive in the lead up and throughout and since the launch.
And if you are new to Casper, I just want to invite you to join our community.
Find us on X. I see that you've pinned a tweet here, or a post as it's called these days.
So follow us, join our telegrams. Feel free to follow me. I post a lot about Casper, obviously. And if you're a developer, go to docs.casper.network
and go through our tutorials and see how easy it is to get
started.
We're excited to work with everybody who's
working on something interesting.
And obviously, very excited to welcome anybody
into our community, because that's ultimately
what it's all about.
And yeah, looking forward to Consensus next week,
where we'll be talking about Casper 2.0 a lot.
Awesome, awesome.
I have a small feeling that next week is going to be the announcement week,
just because Consensus is around the door.
I'm just, I mean, that's what I'm,
you can see, it's fine.
It's fine, I'm quite sure.
I'm not gonna comment.
I got a small feeling here.
Besides that, unfortunately, I'm not going to consensus.
It's in Toronto nowadays, right?
That's right, yes.
I would say that's better than Austin. I would say that's better than Austin.
I think it's definitely better than Austin.
I haven't checked the weather yet for next week,
but Austin can get a little balmy.
Yeah, yeah. Because I went to Konstantin's Austin
and it was like 40 degrees Celsius
and I was like, yeah, this is like the same.
I got flashbacks whenever I went to Dubai.
It's like the weather is so hot.'s like for you for me as a dutch guy it's like yeah this uh this is
insane that being said um i'm very much looking forward on the updates i'm very much looking
forward obviously announcements and what is coming up i will definitely keep an eye on
for the audience if you would like to check them out,
I've pinned two tweets.
I've pinned the tweet of Michael,
so you can follow him.
Because I would definitely do so,
if I was you guys considering.
What I like about you, Michael,
is that sometimes you provide some extra insights,
which the main account doesn't.
And it provides essentially a bit more flavor
and more context on what's actually happening
behind the scenes.
I really appreciate that.
And obviously, if you feel like,
hey, I just want to be in the loop,
I just want to understand what they are doing,
the main account will also provide you a lot of insights
and offer there as well.
For the audience, I would like to thank you
for staying with us for, well, 60 minutes.
I really, really appreciate you for that.
And Michael, very much appreciate it for coming on,
considering I know even though you had a busy week,
I'm quite sure you're still pretty busy with consensus
just coming up around the door.
So I really, really appreciate you for making some time for us.
Always happy to join you.
And thank you for having me.
And thanks to your community.
And looking forward to the next one.
Absolutely. And that one will definitely come in a couple of months i actually have a great idea which i will
um share with you very shortly um everyone thank you so much for joining and i wish you all a
pleasant weekend already um we will have another twitter spacesaces on, I think, on Wednesday and next week, Friday.
And hopefully I will see all of you then as well. Have a great weekend. Bye-bye. Cheers, everyone.
Thanks, everyone. Bye.
