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Securing Casper 2.0: The Biggest Upgrade of Casper Network To Date
Recorded: May 20, 2025 Duration: 0:34:45Space Recording
Short Summary
Casper is making waves in the blockchain space with the recent launch of Casper 2.0, touted as the biggest upgrade in its history, and the upcoming Casper 2.1. Strategic partnerships, including a significant collaboration with a U.S. parking industry leader, are set to enhance real-world applications, while ongoing security audits with Halborn ensure robust protocol integrity.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you
hey everyone so welcome to another edition of halb Office Hours here on X Spaces.
I'm Gabby from Halborn, so I'll be your host today.
So whether you are a builder, security pro, or just a crypto curious, you are today in the right place. So today's episode is a special one because we are joined by Michael Stover from Casper.
I don't know if I pronounce it rightly.
So a project we've been proud to work with since 2022 so this is not just a client relationship it's
a shared commitment to to raising the bar in blockchain security and innovation so all right
michael so great to have you here and before we even dive into the tech, could you introduce yourself from our audience?
So what's your role at Casper?
What's been keeping you busy lately?
Sure, Gavi.
And first of all, you pronounced Casper correctly,
if that's what you meant.
Nice to be here.
Thank you for having me.
I spent actually quite some time with your team
in Consensus last week in Toronto, which was nice.
Always good to be with Halborn.
And as you mentioned, we've been working together
for about three years now.
So again, excited to be here.
So you asked who I am and what I do and why I'm here.
So I'm the CTO and president of the Casper Association.
And background-wise, I started my journey
into technology back in the mid-'90s during the early days of web one actually
as uh as we didn't call it at the time but we probably refer to it uh now um i was part of
europe's first e-commerce wave building some of the first online services in the netherlands which
is where i'm from um and from there i transitioned into mobile technology, rolling out SMS-based services,
and later bringing Japan's iMode platform to Europe,
which was sort of the predecessor to the mobile web.
And then eventually I became the CTO for mobile at THQ,
which was one of the top three video game publishers globally at the time.
And there we put the first downloadable mobile games
on cell phones back in 2001,
which was really the start of the mobile gaming industry.
And that era laid the foundation
for what would become the mobile app economy
that we are all sort of participating in these days.
Later, I moved into social and mobile gaming
and sort of being part of the Web2 wave.
And then around 2012, while living in Silicon Beach or Santa Monica, California, I started getting involved in the early blockchain and Web3 projects.
three projects. I worked with teams behind Tether and Wax, two of the very early innovators in the
space, as well as many other sort of projects that were being started in Silicon Beach.
And after we sold the social gaming company that I was the CTO of in 2016, I made Web3 my full-time focus. And by 2018, we identified a very clear gap,
which was that there wasn't really a layer one blockchain that truly met enterprise needs. And
that is what led me to co-founding Casper. So I was one of the co-founders back in 2018,
helped start up the project and uh then sort of operationally stepped
back for a few years and and came back in as uh the cto and president now of the casper association
since late last year well congratulations for for your amazing background so it's really impressive
It's really impressive.
Now let's set the stage.
So Casper 2.0 is being called the biggest upgrade in the network's history.
So for those less familiar, what is Casper 2.0
and what drove the decision to take on such an ambitious leap?
Sure.
So maybe for your audience who might not be familiar with Casper at all, I'll start with
sort of explaining what Casper 1.0 is or what Casper as a blockchain is right so um we um we launched um well actually let me let me go
back so casper was was founded in in 2018 as i mentioned and we launched the mainnet in 2021
as a layer one blockchain that was uh built on top of the original proof of stake model that was developed in the Ethereum research group
and then finalized by our own Casper researchers.
And from day one, the network was really designed
to support enterprise use cases
by focusing on what enterprises actually need
to integrate blockchain into their existing stacks.
We touched on that a little bit earlier,
but those needs include things like built-in end-to-end
testing, support for programming languages
instead of solidity so that companies don't
have to retrain their entire engineering team,
strong access controls, better workflows around software
upgrades, and real modularity.
And that enterprise foundation is exactly what sort of shaped
Casper 2.0 and what positions it so well currently
to enable the next generation of real-world applications
and users.
So with respect to Casper 2.0, which we successfully launched
on Mainnet, I think it is exactly two weeks ago now,
it is one of the sort of, I would say it's obviously,
it's a major version upgrade of the Casper protocol,
but considering sort of the amount of changes and new features
and things that were included in it,
it's probably one of the biggest upgrades of a live protocol
in sort of the blockchain space.
I'll walk you through what's included.
So one of the most important changes is the introduction
of a new consensus protocol called ZOOC,
which brings deterministic finality.
And for those of you unfamiliar, what that means is that most blockchains,
most major blockchains today, like Bitcoin and Ethereum and many of the layer ones that you're probably familiar with, all rely send a transaction, for example, to an exchange,
they make you wait for multiple confirmations before they are sure and confident that that transaction is really final.
In Ethereum's case, they often say, well, wait for 64 confirmations.
In Bitcoin, it's a lower number, but with their block time of 10 minutes,
it means you get to wait like 30 to 60 minutes before they release your funds.
And all that is sort of fine for crypto native use cases, but it's really not ideal for real world applications where certainty really matters.
So that's where Casper sort of focused on.
That is delivering a system that's more suitable for real-world
use cases through deterministic finality.
So with ZOOC, the network reaches agreements the moment a block is produced and accepted.
So there's no waiting period.
Once a block is finalized, it's immediately and permanently final.
That is really essential for things like financial transactions, regulated asset transfers, legal agreements, basically any situation where ambiguity can create risk or liability.
So when you're selling a major real estate asset, for example, you don't want to be sitting around and waiting for 64 confirmations to know whether the seller still owns it or the buyer has acquired it.
This sort of limbo state doesn't really exist in the real world.
And then beyond the new consensus protocol,
Casper introduced several major other upgrades
that really set it apart.
So for example, we now provide built-in access controls,
which allow developers to define who can do what
in a smart contract without having
to rebuild permissions every time.
That's, again, incredibly important in the real world
because companies and transactions have governance and access requirements.
The CFO of a company can do things that the marketing manager can't, for example,
and Casper allows app developers to encode those rules directly into smart contracts,
and then they are enforced on-chain at the protocol level.
So these are not smart contract functions
that the developer has to worry about, also
from a security perspective, obviously.
We also have upgradable smart contracts,
which means that developers can change their business logic
without redeploying or migrating user data.
This matters because business requirements change all the time, right?
Regulations evolve, especially, I mean, I know where I am in California
and the United States, the regulations change on, like, probably annual basis,
if not more often, based on sort of elections and things that sort of change
in our sort of governance environments.
And companies need to be able to respond to those changes transparently and securely.
And Casper was built with that in mind.
And the protocol provides this functionality natively.
Another big step forward in Casper 2.0, and that's one that Halborn also recently very much focused on with us,
is the introduction of a multi-VM architecture.
This means that different execution environments
can now run side by side on the same network.
And that is useful because different types of applications
have different needs, and now they can coexist
within the same layer one.
So to be clear, these aren't roll-ups or sidechains
or anything like that. It's not a layer two.
Each VM runs on the same layer with its own specialized functionality,
but they can still interact with each other
and work with smart contracts that are targeting or running on other VMs.
So it's all fully compatible within a unified protocol.
And finally, I'll mention something that's always
been a priority for us, which is developer friendliness.
We support Rust as a programming language,
use WebAssembly or WASM for execution,
which means that many other mainstream programming
languages can compile to it.
And we offer popular SDKs in mainstream languages
that any sort of mainstream developer can use to build on-chain.
I think the statistic that most or many people are familiar with
is that Web3 has maybe 20,000 developers
who specialize in these obscure programming languages like Solidity.
But if you look at the broader software world,
there are over sort of tens of millions of engineers out there
who know mainstream programming languages.
And these are the people that work at real-world companies.
Like an existing real-world company
won't have any Solidity engineers on their staff.
Casper is really focused on enabling those tens of millions of software engineers and
bringing them into blockchain development as well.
So these are the highlights.
There is a lot more.
But for us, this all adds up as a very, very major protocol upgrade.
And it's really not just designed for the crypto space,
but it's built to support long-term real-world systems
that need to be secure and flexible and adaptable.
Well, I mean, this one feels like a complete evolution,
not just a patch.
Revolution.
Yeah.
Yeah, so honestly, I really love the name of
Soogh, because
if I'm not wrong,
Soogh is a train
in German, right?
So it's like
it's got the Swiss
precision to it, so
I really love that name.
And I mean, a massive upgrade like this
only works if this is secure. And of course, that's where Halborn comes in. So we had the
pleasure of working with your team since some years ago. from yours perspective how did this uh security last
security engagements uh go and what we were you aiming to test or strengthen in the protocols
sure so first of all as i mentioned like rolling out a major version upgrade on a live network is not for the faint
of heart right so this upgrade went live on mainnet two weeks ago it all sort of went
seamlessly and without any sort of hiccups which obviously when you roll out to a mainnet is not
something that you're necessarily sort of,
I can tell you, like, you asked me what I've been up to
and what is keeping me up.
Like, I didn't really sleep well the night
before the mainnet upgrade.
And it had nothing to do necessarily with security,
but more about, like, you're going to a mainnet that's
very different from testing environments, right?
Like, it's not easy to simulate the circumstances of mainnet
with validators all over the world
running on different types of hardware,
different types of data centers, et cetera,
and a state of a protocol that is just hard to simulate.
And the fact that that all went as smoothly as it did
is a function of just very, very good preparation, of which our security collaboration with Halborn was a major part.
So you mentioned we've been working together for years.
You guys are super familiar with our protocol and our code base.
on our code base.
You don't only work with us on the security
of the protocol itself, but we also
work with you for many of the ecosystem projects
that launch on Casper, meaning that you're basically
end-to-end experts.
You know the inside details of the node
in the protocol, but you also know what it takes
to develop on top of the protocol, which
means that if you want to try and break the protocol,
like figure out if you have any vectors that might be
exploitable, et cetera, you have the experience
that it takes
to build applications on top of it that might not act the way
as one would expect, which is, I think,
a very good benefit for a security firm to have
versus just looking in an almost academic way
at the protocol and the source code of Node software, et cetera.
So you have that leg up.
The other thing that I would say is you asked what we were testing for.
Obviously, Casper has had a well-published security issue
mid-last year in July.
And that was obviously front of mind as well when we were working with you on auditing Casper 2.0,
trying to see if such a security issue might be exploitable in the upgrade or post-upgrade.
So we focused on general security auditing,
which we've definitely leveraged the experience that you have with building on top of our protocol.
And there were some very specific sort of vectors and exploits,
sort of theories that we wanted to test with you.
And overall, I think our project together on Casper 2.0
was about like four months or so.
So it was a very in-depth um detailed and highly collaborative
efforts um and um and we're very pleased with the results um very appreciative so thank you so much
and it's you know it's always amazing from a security perspective to see how important is the security for you and how your engineering team
integrates like any feedback and security best practices into the development cycle so
so thank you so much and and i really love from your team is like your motto, your like the mantra
you use. I read this around like Casper empowers people to benefit from who they are, what they do
and what they own. So that's really powerful. So can you unpack this and what that means,
and especially in a Web3 context? Sure. So we really sort of wanted to focus on values, right?
There is a lot of motivations for people to build within the Web3 context.
And many of those motivations are perhaps short-term and self-serving
and don't necessarily provide for the sustainable long-term vision for a thriving ecosystem. So for us, we are in this because we believe there is massive sort of relevance to distributed
ledger technology in the real world in the long term.
And that's importance has to permeate, it permeates to sort to all participants in the real world.
So I'm actually going to take it beyond Web3 and into the broader worlds.
When we talk about people, I'm not talking about degens necessarily.
necessarily.
Or I mean, they're obviously part of people, but not the only people.
I mean, they're obviously part of people, but not the only people.
If you step outside of your office, you'll find that there are people out there who've
never done anything on blockchain.
In fact, the majority.
And what we are working towards is a world where blockchain becomes a technology that
is a part of the real world
and empowers processes and companies and people
to do things in a better way.
When you, as a consumer, go to the supermarket,
you pay for your groceries and not for even a split second
do you think about whether your
payment went over the Swift network or the MasterCard network or the Visa network or whatever
the case may be, right? Like you just go and expect that your payment goes through and you
don't even think about it. Similarly, I don't know if you were like very technology focused,
but back in the 90s, everybody knew what sort of type of network
their phone was on, whether it was GSM or CDMA, 1G, 2G, 2.5G,
You know, there were all these technology terms floating around,
and people were comparing their technologies
and being a fan of one or the other.
These days, nobody even thinks twice
about the sort of the protocols
that their phone is operating on.
They just expect things to work.
I think that is the world that we are working towards
in Web3, meaning blockchain is there in the background
making things better, empowering people,
empowering companies.
And it shouldn't be about sort of this technological discussion anymore,
but just about how do we empower people?
How do we make things better in the long run and enable those things?
So that's really what Casper is about.
So who are you really building this Casper 2.0 for?
I mean, it's like, what does your ideal user or developer look like?
Sure. So we really believe that we're on the precipice of real-world integration.
And I think there's a lot of things that are obviously happening in the more recent time
that sort of reinforces that.
Obviously, you see everything that's going on over the last year
with sort of institutions getting behind at least crypto as an asset class,
which is probably a good indicator of where things are going, right?
Because like once sort of the institutional money comes in
and companies are putting crypto assets on their balance sheet.
And sort of there's some acceptance happening there that didn't happen before.
But ultimately, it's real trading and things like that.
So examples are like we just announced last week that we are working with one of the leaders in the U.S. parking industry on bringing the it's $140 billion a year parking industry in the
United States on chain.
And that's, as you might imagine, not a super high tech industry.
There is a lot of sort of trust that it operates on, processes that are antiquated.
You have a lot of adverse parties or stakeholders in that ecosystem, right?
So I don't, I mean, I didn't know much about the parking industry until recently.
So I'll explain what goes on there.
So you have parking lot owners and you have the parking lot operators who run these parking
lots.
Like imagine sort of the massive parking structures at airports, etc.
You have people who actually resell parking spaces in these parking lots.
So there are aggregators.
There are regulators that are involved.
When you have a parking structure in an airport,
you end up having to pay, as the owner or the operator,
taxes and fees to the city and to the airport authority and things like that.
There's probably somewhere between five and ten adverse parties in that value chain.
And there's just a lot of room of improvement for transparency and auditability and reporting and things like that
that blockchain can play a meaningful role in.
And secondly, these are also sort of yield-bearing assets, right?
Like if you have a parking structure on an airport
with 2,000, 5,000, whatever spots,
I mean, I know that when I park my car at the airport,
I'm always amazed by how much I have to pay there.
But you can imagine the amount of revenue
that these structures throw off on a regular basis.
So there's a lot of opportunity there
to tokenize these types of assets as well
and create liquidity in sort of yield-bearing assets that
are in the real world, right?
It's not just trading paper or digital assets on-chain.
It's creating liquidity around otherwise illiquid assets,
which is ultimately the single largest asset class in the world, right?
ultimately the single largest asset class in the world, right?
So real estate, right?
Physical infrastructure is exponentially larger than anything else from an asset class perspective.
Wow.
I mean, it's amazing to listen to these real world projects.
I mean, real world assets is a trend, but not only that. Real world projects on Casper, I mean,
mean something tangible for everyone.
So it's a really good use.
So, I mean, time to look ahead.
So what's next?
I mean, what's next on the Casper roadmap?
And any sneak peeks or announcements for our audience today?
Sure.
So, I mean, as I mentioned, we just launched Casper 2.0 on Mainnet just two weeks ago, right?
So it's still pretty fresh.
But with 2.0 now in our rearview mirror, we're already moving forward and working on Casper 2.1.
So Casper 2.0 took nearly two years to develop, which was a major, major effort, as you pointed out.
But we are now shifting to a quarterly protocol release schedule.
So you should expect to see Casper 2.1 go live on mainnet
in the next three months or so.
And one of the key innovations that's coming in 2.1
will be the introduction of a second virtual machine
that runs in parallel on top of our existing virtual machine
in our new multi-VM architecture.
So this new VM will offer an even more simplified
smart contract interface for developers,
making it even easier and more accessible
to develop on top of Casper network.
It also introduces new capabilities
like self-describing contracts,
which can automatically generate SDKs and even applications based on the metadata
that they self-generate.
So you can imagine the potential that this might unlock,
especially when combined with AI-driven development
workflows.
So you could have applications that dynamically spawn
new contracts for themselves.
It's an exciting direction for us.
And other than that, we're very, very focused on driving adoption.
So we just announced this parking partnership last week.
There will be more announcements in the near future.
And we're working on implementing those with our partners, helping them be successful,
and really driving the projects, the protocol, the ecosystem,
and with it, we believe,
sort of the broader Web3 world forward.
Well, I mean, this has been awesome, Michael.
I mean, thanks for sharing all these insights.
And it's a pleasure always listening to you.
Before wrapping up, anything you'd like to leave our audience with?
Yeah, sure.
As always, I would love for your listeners to become part of our community.
So if you are a developer, we'd love to have you in our ecosystem.
Visit docs.casper.network where you can find tutorials and guides
and really learn how easy it is to build end-to-end blockchain applications
with languages and methodologies that you're already familiar with.
with languages and methodologies that you're already familiar with.
And if you're a user and just want to learn more about Casper,
follow us on X.
The account is active here as a co-host,
so you should see it on your screen.
It's at Casper underscore network.
So in our Telegram community,
we have our main English language group,
but also a dozen or so language-specific groups.
So wherever you are in the world, you should find a Casper group that you're comfortable in.
And we are always excited to meet new members of our community.
And if you are a business or a Web3 project looking to start building real-world use cases, reach out to us, reach out to me.
You can find me on X and Telegram.
DMs are open, and I look forward to meeting everybody.
Okay, so thank you, Michael.
Thank you, Kasper, and thank you, everyone,
for hanging out with us today.
So, as Michael mentioned, don't forget to follow Casper
and don't forget to follow Halborn here on X.
We'll see you everyone at the next Halborn Office Hours.
Stay safe, stay smart and keep building.
Thank you, Gabi.
Appreciate it.
Bye.
Host
Casper
from
Casper Network
