Fresh off the mainnet launch of Casper 2.0, our CTO, Michael Steuer, has been making the rounds to break down what’s new and what’s next. In this AMA hosted by Bybit, he shares insight into the upgrade and what lies beyond.
You can listen to the recording of the X Space here.
Below is a condensed version of the Q&A, but we highly recommend reading through the full questions and answers starting below the condensed version for a comprehensive understanding of Casper 2.0, its short- and long-term vision, the role of the Casper Association, governance, and more.
You can view the full version of each answer by clicking on the corresponding question.
What’s your background, and how did you get involved with Casper?
I co-founded Casper in 2018 after a long career spanning Web1, mobile, gaming, and early Web3. I now serve as President and CTO of the Casper Association.
What is Casper Network, and how does it stand out?
Casper is a Layer-1 blockchain built for real-world use cases, with enterprise features like upgradability, access control, and mainstream developer support. It’s designed to meet real business needs, not just serve crypto-native users.
Casper 2.0 introduces deterministic finality via Zug consensus, built-in access control, contract upgradability, and multi-VM support. It’s a foundational step toward scalable, secure, real-world blockchain adoption.
Why is it called “Casper”? Is it the ghost?
There are a few reasons behind the name, but the real one is that it all started with Ethereum’s original consensus protocol whitepaper, Casper CBC.
How is Casper 2.0 ready for real-world scale?
Casper enforces complex ownership and compliance rules at the protocol level, not in app logic, with features like built-in multi-sig and granular permissions. It’s auditable, adaptable, and designed for assets governed by real laws and stakeholders.
Did you build Casper because you saw a market gap?
Yes, traditional businesses needed guardrails, tools, and legal clarity that Web3 didn’t offer. Casper fills that gap with infrastructure that the real world can trust.
How does governance work, and how is decentralization ensured?
The Casper Association is decentralizing via on-chain governance that’s legally enforceable in Switzerland. CSPR holders and validators influence upgrades, protocol changes, and even board elections.
What’s next, and how can people get involved?
Casper 2.1 is coming soon with a new VM and self-describing contracts. Developers can get started at docs.casper.network, and anyone can connect via Telegram or @Casper_Network on X.
What role does the community play in Casper governance?
Validators decide upgrades, and users delegate stake to them, so your stake is your vote. Casper is also implementing on-chain votes that carry real legal weight.
What marketing strategies are being used?
Casper is focusing on use case visibility and partner-driven storytelling. Expect announcements and campaign pushes around real-world adoption.
I don’t think traditional software engineering is going anywhere soon. AI is more of a productivity tool. Casper even has a project (Korale AI) that lets users deploy contracts by describing them in plain English.
Are there grants or incentives for builders?
Grants are offered on a case-by-case basis, and hackathons are planned. Builders can reach out to Casper.
Can you name any projects already building on Casper?
Yes, EquityBrix is building real-world asset tokenization on Casper. Others include Band Royalty for music rights and royalties. More are coming soon.
I’m the CTO and the President of the board of the Casper Association, which is the nonprofit organization that helps support and grow the Casper Network. I’ve been in this role since late last year, but I was an original co-founder of the Casper project back in 2018, so I’ll give you a brief history of how I got there.
I started in the early e-commerce industry in Europe in the mid-90s, and that was the time that I guess we would now refer to as Web 1. After running some of the earliest e-commerce companies in the Netherlands, which is where I’m from, I got involved in the mobile technology industry in the late 90s. There, we introduced the first mobile interactive applications to the markets, which at first, for those of you who can remember, were very simple SMS-based applications.
Then, as networks and devices improved, I helped roll out Japan’s i-mode service in Europe, which was a predecessor to the mobile web. Around 2001, when devices became even more powerful, I became the CTO for mobile at THQ, which was one of the top three video game publishers in the world at the time, and we put the first downloadable mobile games on cell phones, which started the mobile gaming industry and the app economy that followed.
I stayed in the mobile and later social gaming industries for the next decade and a half, being part of the early Web2 transition that started toward the end of the 2000s. By around 2012–2013, my gaming work started to overlap with the early Web3 world. By then, I was based in Santa Monica, California, or Silicon Beach, as it’s often referred to, and a lot of the early Web3 projects were founded there.
For example, Tether was founded in our meeting room at our office, and many other blockchain projects that people might be familiar with.
I became a technical advisor to many of them, as well as to their investors, while still being the CTO of this social gaming publisher. When we sold that company in 2016, my part-time obsession with Web3 became a full-time one, and the rest is, as they say, history. In 2018, my partners and I founded the Casper project to bring an enterprise-level proof-of-stake network into existence. So that’s how I got here.
We founded Casper in 2018, but the mainnet was launched in 2021 as a Layer-1 blockchain built on the original proof-of-stake model that came out of the Ethereum research group and was later finalized by our own researchers at Casper.
From day one, Casper was designed for enterprise use cases, meaning we prioritized what real businesses need to actually adopt blockchain. This includes things like support for mainstream programming languages, built-in testing for test-driven development, access controls to applications, and a much more modular and upgradable architecture. And we can dig into that a little bit later as well.
So what we’ve all seen of the blockchain industry during this first phase of its existence is that it’s mostly been preoccupied with building solutions for itself. How can we come up with or improve new ways for crypto-native users to interact with the technology? However, the next phase of this industry, we believe, will be about how blockchain will integrate with the real world, which is infinitely larger and infinitely more complex than our little Web3 sandbox. And Casper is designed to enable that real-world integration. That’s what we’re here to do.
Casper 2.0 just launched on the mainnet two days ago. It’s a really big upgrade, and it perfectly positions Casper Network to be the rails for the next generation of real-world blockchain use cases.
Let me walk you through a few things that Casper 2.0 introduces.
First, Casper 2.0 introduces a new consensus protocol called Zug, which uses deterministic finality. This is different from most major blockchains today: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many Layer-2s, which rely on probabilistic finality. In those systems, when a block is added to the chain, it’s not finalized immediately. You usually have to wait for multiple confirmations before you can be confident that a transaction won’t be rolled back. That might be acceptable for crypto-native use cases, but it’s not ideal when certainty really matters.
For example, if you’re selling a house, you don’t want to wait for “64 confirmations” to know whether it’s truly sold. Zug eliminates that uncertainty. The moment the network reaches agreement and produces a block, it’s final, permanent, and instant. That’s a big deal for use cases like financial transactions, regulated asset transfers, and legal agreements, where ambiguity can create risk. But consensus is just one part of it.
Casper 2.0 also introduces built-in access controls, allowing developers to define roles and permissions directly within smart contracts, at the protocol level. So instead of reinventing that logic each time, it’s handled natively. In the real world, you have governance requirements: a CFO can approve things that a marketing manager can’t. Casper lets you embed those rules directly, and the network enforces them.
Then there’s smart contract upgradability. Casper allows contracts to evolve without redeploying or migrating user data. This is critical in the real world, where business logic and regulations change. Being able to update a contract transparently and securely without disruption is a big advantage.
We also introduced a multi-VM architecture. Different virtual machines can now run side by side on the same Layer-1 network. These aren’t sidechains or rollups. They’re fully integrated VMs that can interact with each other, allowing applications with different needs to operate natively within the same environment.
And finally, Casper remains focused on developer accessibility. We support Rust and WebAssembly (WASM), and provide SDKs for languages like JavaScript, Go, and .NET. Web3 today may have 20,000 developers fluent in specialized languages like Solidity. But the real world has tens of millions of engineers who know mainstream tools and languages. Casper opens blockchain development to that much larger community, without requiring them to start from scratch or learn obscure languages.
So altogether, Casper 2.0 isn’t just a protocol upgrade. It’s a step toward making blockchain infrastructure viable for long-term, real-world systems—systems that need to be secure, adaptable, and understandable.
There are definitely a lot of plays on that. But it’s called Casper because that was the name of the original consensus protocol white paper developed in the Ethereum research group.
If you followed Ethereum’s journey from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, you might know that there were a couple of proposals for their PoS approach, and both were essentially called Casper. There were two different variants: Casper FFG and Casper CBC. Without boring your audience with all the technical details, Ethereum eventually implemented Casper FFG with the Merge, and we took Casper CBC, developed it further, and that’s what Casper is based on today.
I’ll add, since you brought up the ghost, Casper was officially launched on Halloween in 2018, in a town called Casper, Wyoming, in the United States. So yes, lots of ghosts on that day. There are a few reasons behind the name, but the real one is that it all started with that consensus white paper.
Great question, and very true about the experimental feel. Most Web3 projects have taken an approach of rapid iteration with very few guardrails. You know, “move fast and break things,” as Mark Zuckerberg used to say, before he matured a bit and appreciated the realities of the real world.
But real-world use cases, especially in enterprise or regulated sectors, simply have different requirements than meme token platforms. Take real-world assets, for example. Casper 2.0 is built specifically to support tokenized real-world assets. These are assets that exist off-chain but can be represented and managed on-chain; real estate, financial instruments, intellectual property, and even physical infrastructure can fall within scope here.
What makes Casper suitable for those use cases is that it doesn’t just handle the asset itself, but also the rules, rights, and responsibilities that come with it. Because in the real world, ownership is rarely simple. It comes with access restrictions, multi-party approvals, and regulatory obligations. And beyond that, business terms evolve, and regulations change, meaning the assets exist in a dynamic and complex context. It’s not just a token you launch once and forget about. You need to maintain it, interact with it, and adapt it to new conditions.
Casper 2.0 supports that complexity directly at the protocol level, and this also significantly reduces security risk. If you don’t have that at the protocol level, you’re forcing developers to implement bespoke versions of this complexity every time, and that leads to more vulnerability.
To give a concrete example: imagine you have a real-world asset like a building, a parking structure, or a solar farm. That asset is subject to local and national laws and regulations, which can change frequently depending on the jurisdiction. Here in California, for instance, it feels like they change every year based on the political environment.
When you’re transacting in these kinds of assets, there are often multiple stakeholders, sometimes with conflicting interests, who all need to reach consensus. That’s where blockchain excels. And Casper, in particular, has native multi-signature functionality to support this. So if a property is owned by 10 people, and you need six of them to approve a sale, the transaction will only go through if those six approvals are registered natively within the system.
And in real estate, it’s never just buyers and sellers. You’ve got lenders, brokers, listing agents, title registries, tax authorities—there’s always a tax authority involved! All of these parties have different rights and responsibilities, and Casper’s granular access control allows each one to access only what they’re permitted to. This fine-grained permissioning is enforced at the protocol level, not just in the smart contract logic or application layer.
That’s a major security improvement. Developers don’t have to rebuild it from scratch. And it’s not only enforced, it’s fully auditable, compatible with compliance workflows, and deterministic. These are all essential properties the real world requires when operating at scale. And Casper is uniquely designed to deliver them.
Yes. What we see, and I think something that we all saw, is that the industry as a whole has been talking for a long time about how blockchain is meant to be a lot more than the use cases we’ve seen so far, which are mostly crypto-native. We’ve all been floating around the Web3 world, doing the same things on different platforms, sometimes migrating platforms, but always staying within our little sandbox.
The broader world hadn’t really caught on until recently. And I feel like that’s because they simply weren’t ready to operate the way the blockchain world has been operating. This “move fast and break things” mantra works for internal experimentation, but it doesn’t work for enterprise or institutional adoption. They didn’t have the right tools, the right processes, or the protections they needed to actually make that leap into blockchain.
But now, I think we’re at the precipice of that changing. And what the broader world needs now is a blockchain platform that can meet them where they are, and that’s exactly what we’ve built Casper to be.
The Casper Association is a Swiss nonprofit organization, and it’s responsible for supporting the ongoing development and the long-term health of the Casper Network.
The Association helps, for example, guide the technical direction of the network toward real-world utility and enabling systems to be built on-chain with the features that I mentioned earlier: auditability, upgradability, and access controls at their core.
We ensure that core protocol developers working on the Casper protocol can collaborate effectively. We help orchestrate and coordinate work across different teams. We also make sure that application developers have the documentation and tools they need to build on Casper, and that node operators, including validators and partners like ByBit, who run their own nodes, have what they need to operate reliably.
In addition to that, the Casper Association is mandated to promote maximum decentralization of the network and the protocol. And that’s not just a principle, it’s something we’re actively working on.
To give you an example, the Association itself is undergoing further decentralization by implementing an on-chain governance model. This will allow the Casper community—CSPR holders—to directly participate in key decisions, not just for the network and protocol, but even for how the Association itself operates going forward, which is pretty cool.
And we’re doing it in a way, in Switzerland, that’s quite unique in our industry. This on-chain governance model actually has a real-world legal effect on the Swiss entity, as recognized by Swiss law, which is a really nice crossover of Web3 and the real world that we’re applying to our own governance model.
So in short, we support the infrastructure, the community, and the evolution of Casper, all while keeping it open, neutral, and trustworthy over the long term.
We launched Casper 2.0 on mainnet just about 48 hours ago (maybe 50 hours ago by now), but it’s still relatively fresh. It went completely seamlessly, which is a massive milestone that was two years in the making for us. It involved several hundreds of thousands of lines of code added or modified in the Casper Protocol software stack, and it’s really a huge accomplishment for our engineering team. So we’re super happy, proud, and glad with how things went.
But Casper 2.1 is already underway. While Casper 2.0 took close to two years, we’re now moving to a quarterly release schedule, and you should expect to see Casper 2.1 go live on mainnet within the next three months.
One of the main innovations coming with Casper 2.1 will be the addition of a new Virtual Machine, the second VM to run in parallel within our Multi-VM architecture. This VM will offer an even more simplified smart contract interface for developers. It introduces new capabilities like self-describing contracts, which can automatically generate SDKs and even apps based on contract metadata. You can imagine the potential this unlocks, for example, in AI-based software development or applications that dynamically spawn new contracts. There’s a lot of opportunity here.
Then, from a use case perspective, we’re very excited about some upcoming announcements in the next few weeks—new projects launching on Casper Network. Now that Casper 2.0 is live, and as you might expect based on our conversation so far, these will mostly be in the areas of real-world assets, both in terms of tokenization as well as governance and compliance.
So the release of Casper 2.0 marks just the beginning of an entirely new phase, not just for Casper, but hopefully for the broader blockchain industry as well. We finally have a blockchain that meets the real world where it is—one that supports layered ownership, governance, and compliance, and natively enforces all of that on-chain.
If you’re a developer, please get involved with our ecosystem. You can find information on how to get started at docs.casper.network. Check out some of our tutorials and find out how easy it is to develop end-to-end blockchain apps using the languages and methodologies that you are probably already familiar with.
If you are a ByBit user who wants to get to know Casper better, obviously you can find us on the ByBit exchange with links and information. But you can also follow our socials directly on X at @Casper_Network, and join our Telegram group. My team and I are also always excited to meet new members of the Casper community.
And if you are a business or Web3 project that is looking to start building real-world use cases, meet with us at Consensus in Toronto next week. I’ll be there all week, and I always look forward to forging new partnerships for Casper Network. You can also find me on Telegram or X, and all my DMs are open, so looking forward to connect.
Absolutely. There are different levels of community involvement. First, we always encourage people to join our Telegram group and become active participants in the community. From a governance perspective, Casper is a proof-of-stake network, which means it’s ultimately run by validators who operate nodes, and users delegate their CSPR to these validators.
If you’re a CSPR holder, you can stake with a validator, and that validator’s total delegated stake determines the weight of their vote. For example, when we launched the Casper 2.0 upgrade, we proposed the upgrade to validators, but they had to decide whether or not to install it. In order for a network or protocol upgrade, or any change in the network’s spec, to take effect, two-thirds (67%) of the network stake must agree. That power lies entirely with validators, but validators only have that power because users have staked with them. So, as a user, you influence the protocol directly through your staking decisions.
We’re also rolling out new features, such as a new VM and a reworked gas model that will make interacting with dApps on Casper essentially free. These changes are subject to community-level governance decisions as well.
Beyond that, we’re decentralizing the Casper Association. Currently, the board constitutes its membership, but we’re opening it up to mainnet validators, large exchanges like Bybit, and other key ecosystem players. Going forward, these members will vote on board composition, including potentially replacing me! And importantly, we’re implementing an on-chain governance mechanism that will be legally enforceable in Switzerland. That means on-chain votes will have a real-world legal effect on the Association.
This level of binding governance is rare in the industry, and we believe it puts Casper on the path to becoming one of the most truly decentralized projects out there. So yes, get involved, help govern the network, and help govern the organization building it.
I’ll give you some high-level points. We focus heavily on engaging with our community, like being here today with partners such as ByBit, and reaching out to their communities as well. Beyond that, we’re working closely with our ecosystem partners to highlight the real-world use cases being built on Casper, because ultimately, it’s all about adoption.
As I mentioned earlier, this week has been focused on the Casper 2.0 launch, and next week we’ll be at Consensus. But in the coming weeks and months, we’re excited to announce several new use cases launching on the network. We’ll be actively marketing these initiatives together with our partners to boost visibility and demonstrate how Casper is being used in practice.
The opinions are pretty divided. If I talk to my engineering team, maybe they’re being a bit defensive, but they see AI more as a tool than a threat. It’s helpful for getting certain tasks done more quickly, kind of like how students might use it to help with their papers. But especially for complex projects, the results just aren’t quite there yet. There are still limits to what AI can realistically do.
That said, there are some very interesting opportunities. For example, on Casper, we have a project called Korale AI. It’s an app where you can describe a smart contract in natural language, and it will build, deploy, and launch it for you on the network. You can say something like: “I want to launch a token that users can stake with, where a percentage of the staking goes to an admin wallet, and everyone who stakes receives another token as a reward,” and the AI will generate that for you. A few minutes later, that exact token exists on the Casper Network, ready to use.
So yes, there are definitely cool things happening, but I don’t think traditional software engineering is going away anytime soon.
Yes, we do incentivize builders. We handle this on a one-to-one basis, meaning we engage directly with projects and evaluate grants individually. So if you’re building something or looking to start a project, just reach out to us, and our team will work with you on it.
We’re also planning additional hackathons and similar initiatives throughout the year, where there will be incentives for developers to experiment with Casper 2.0.
You can get in touch by visiting casper.network, joining our Telegram community, or messaging the team directly on X. You can also find detailed developer documentation and resources at docs.casper.network.
There are quite a few, in fact. There’s a company called EquityBrix, which is really a real-world assets sort of tokenization and deal platform. And they’re building on Casper, launching their tokenization with us, as well as their compliance. And you should see some interesting demos and things like that coming from them here in the next few weeks. And there are others, like an IP company that we recently announced, which is in the music industry, where you get to tokenize your rights as an artist and then collect your royalties. So that’s called Band Royalty, which you can look up.
There are quite a few, and I don’t want to give away any of our upcoming announcements, so you’ll just have to follow our socials, and you’ll find out about those in the weeks to come.
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