Michael immediately framed the discussion around a single number: 6%. “Blockchain’s global penetration rate remains around 6% after 16 years,” explained Michael. Email reached the same level in about four years, while the web did it in about five. For him, this gap is not simply a matter of messaging or market cycles but a deeper issue in how blockchain infrastructure has been designed.

He described the Casper Manifest as a roadmap built around nine concrete protocol initiatives organized into four broad areas. Rather than presenting the roadmap as a feature list, he framed it around the question of who Casper is building for.

Blockchain’s 6% adoption problem comes from the fact that the industry has not properly addressed four distinct audiences: developers, users, institutions, and machines.

Michael emphasized that machines are no longer a theoretical future audience. With AI agents beginning to act as autonomous digital participants, machines need to be considered a real user class.

“Yes, machines are now a user class,” Michael said. “And if your protocol doesn’t account for that, then you’re really building for 2022.”

The first audience Michael discussed was developers, especially those coming from the existing Solidity and EVM ecosystem.

He noted that Solidity developers already have years of accumulated tooling, libraries, and workflows. Many live in tools such as Hardhat and Foundry, use contract libraries like OpenZeppelin, and connect through wallets like MetaMask. Historically, Casper was not on their radar because it did not speak their language.

Michael confirmed that EVM compatibility is planned for the end of the year, allowing developers to deploy existing Solidity contracts on Casper, connect MetaMask, use Foundry, and bring over audited contracts without rewriting everything from scratch.

But Michael was clear that Casper is not simply becoming another EVM chain. The broader point is Casper’s multi-VM architecture. Casper has supported WebAssembly from the beginning, and adding EVM does not mean bolting on a sidecar, layer 2, or separate execution layer. Instead, EVM plugs into the same execution framework, enabling Solidity contracts and WASM contracts to interact with the same underlying storage and primitives on the same chain.

Michael explained: “Casper is a polyglot chain that speaks EVM alongside everything else.”

Alongside EVM, Casper is also upgrading the network layer. Michael explained that more usage means more demand on the network itself, especially with EVM transactions, post-quantum signatures, batch transactions, and micropayments coming into the picture. The updated networking stack is expected to ship in the second half of the year.

Michael also highlighted the planned native token registry as a major developer-facing improvement. On most chains, tokens exist as separate smart contracts sitting above the native protocol. Each token can have its own behavior, cost structure, and implementation details, which creates inconsistency and unnecessary complexity. With Casper’s native token registry, tokens become first-class protocol citizens, with standardized behavior, dramatically lower cost, and compatibility across multiple VMs.

An ERC-20-style token on the EVM side and a CEP-18-style token on the WASM side could share the same state, without bridges or fragmented liquidity. Michael described this as the deeper meaning of “universal access”: not just adding EVM, but opening Casper’s architecture to the broader Web3 developer ecosystem in a way that gives them capabilities they cannot easily get elsewhere.

The second audience was everyday users.

Michael returned to a point he also made in Bermuda: regular users are not going to manage recovery keys, seed phrases, gas fees, and multi-step blockchain flows just to use an application. 

“The number of loops that we still jump through to get anything done in this space is absolutely staggering,” Michael said.

The first major answer is gasless transactions. With this feature, a dApp developer can sponsor gas on behalf of users. The user does not need to see a gas fee, install CSPR directly, or understand what gas is. They simply use the app.

Michael described gasless transactions as a prerequisite for mainstream adoption, not a nice-to-have feature. The goal is to let users interact with applications without first becoming crypto-native.

The second user-facing improvement is batch transactions. Today, a three-step on-chain action often requires three separate transactions, three signatures, and three gas payments. If the second step fails, the user can be stuck in an incomplete state. Batch transactions bundle these actions into one atomic operation. Either the entire operation works, or it does not. For anyone who has had to approve a token before swapping on a DEX, Michael said the value of this improvement should be obvious.

The third piece is smart accounts, where Casper’s architecture plays an important role. With Casper 2.0, the network introduced unified accounts and contracts at the protocol level. Accounts are no longer just key pairs.

Smart accounts extend that foundation with session keys, spending caps, social recovery, multi-factor authentication, and other controls users already expect from bank accounts and mainstream financial apps. Michael described a future where a user can open a real estate app, sign in with Google, buy a fractional property share, and confirm with Face ID, without ever needing to know they are using blockchain infrastructure.

The third audience was institutions, and Michael said this was the part of the Manifest that drew the most attention at the Digital Finance Forum, given the audience of institutional allocators, fund administrators, and compliance professionals.

He began with privacy. For institutions, public exposure of business data is a non-starter. Trades, positions, counterparties, and other sensitive information cannot simply be visible to competitors on a public chain. At the same time, fully private chains are often problematic because they can hide information from regulators, auditors, and tax authorities.

What institutions need, Michael argued, is not privacy instead of compliance, but privacy and compliance together, which means confidential transactions that are private from competitors but auditable by regulators through selective disclosure.

Casper’s approach is to implement privacy primitives as native protocol operations, which also gives them deterministic pricing. Michael compared this to Casper’s existing fixed transaction costs, where a CSPR transfer has a known fee. The goal is to offer confidential transactions with predictable pricing regardless of whether the network is at 10% or 90% capacity.

Michael then moved to ERC-3643, the standard for regulated tokenized assets. He noted that ERC-3643 already governs tens of billions of dollars in tokenized securities, while forecasts point to a much larger tokenized asset market by 2030. Casper plans to provide native ERC-3643 support, with phase one expected in the second half of the year. Michael also said Casper is active in the ERC-3643 Association and is working with partners toward ISO-level recognition of the standard.

The final institutional theme was quantum resistance. Michael said Casper’s existing architecture, including pluggable cryptographic algorithms, makes this a natural extension. In 2027, Casper expects to begin offering quantum-resistant keys alongside existing algorithms, with an easy migration path for institutions building on the network.

The fourth audience was machines, which Michael described as one of the areas he is personally most excited about.

He argued that while human blockchain adoption remains limited, AI agents change the ceiling entirely. Blockchain may reach 8 billion agents before it reaches 8 billion human users. But machines need a different model of payment and access. They cannot negotiate monthly SaaS agreements or complete billing paperwork. They need per-request payments, and that is where X402 comes in.

Michael explained that HTTP status code 402, “Payment Required,” was reserved in 1997, but only now is the payment infrastructure catching up. With X402, an AI agent can hit an API, receive a 402 response with a price, sign a micropayment, and get the data. There is no API key, billing department, or human in the loop. Payment is made per request and settled on-chain in real time.

Michael said Casper is set to become the first WASM-native Layer 1 with production X402 support, and that this is expected within weeks. Casper has also become a member of the X402 Foundation, which Coinbase spun out to the Linux Foundation to support adoption of the standard.

However, Michael stressed that X402 only solves the payment side. AI agents also need control mechanisms. An agent should not necessarily have unlimited access to funds forever. It may need a one-hour permission window, a $100 daily budget, or access only to specific smart contracts. That is where Casper’s smart account infrastructure comes back in, with scoped permissions, spending limits, and time-bound access.

Michael tied this back to the broader Manifest: these are not four separate product lines. The same infrastructure serves multiple audiences. The native token registry that lowers cost for developers also provides compliance hooks for institutions. Smart accounts that enable Face ID for users also give AI agents spending limits. Gasless transactions that remove gas friction for new users also allow agents to operate without holding tokens.

“It all fits together,” Michael said. “That’s what moves the needle from 6%, not one feature, the full stack.”

Michael gave a clean timeline for the Manifest.

In the second half of 2026, Casper is targeting network upgrades, EVM compatibility, X402 production support, and ERC-3643 phase one. X402 is expected much sooner, within weeks. From late 2026 into the first half of 2027, the roadmap includes gasless transactions built on unified contracts and accounts, batch transactions, and native token registry phase one. Later in 2027, Casper expects to move into transaction privacy and quantum resistance.

Michael described Casper’s current position as a return to the kind of architectural edge the project had in its early years. He noted that Casper began with ideas ahead of the industry, lost some of that edge over time, but is now in a position to lead, thanks again to its existing foundation: instant finality, pluggable cryptography, unified contracts and accounts, and multiple parallel VMs.

After the Manifest section, Michael shifted to Proof Layer and Casper’s real-world asset work.

Proof Layer is Casper’s framework for verifiable data pipelines. The core technology uses trusted execution environments, including systems such as AWS Nitro Enclaves, to collect data from real-world systems, produce cryptographic proofs of what the data is, where it came from, and when it was collected, then consolidate those proofs into Merkle trees anchored on Casper mainnet.

The first major use case is the U.S. parking industry through Parking Blox. Michael explained why parking is such a strong fit: it is a large, fragmented industry with multiple parties who often lack a shared, trustworthy view of the money. Operators, revenue control vendors, property owners, and tax authorities each rely on separate systems and reports. No single party has a complete picture.

Michael described this as a textbook trust problem involving multiple parties with misaligned incentives. It is exactly the kind of issue verifiable data infrastructure is designed to solve.

The Parking Blox MVP has been live on Casper mainnet since earlier this year. Real parking transaction data from real facilities is flowing through the pipeline and being recorded on-chain. Michael made clear that this is not a testnet demo. It is production data.

The solution currently addresses three main use cases.

The first is multi-party trust enhancement. When a parking operator runs a garage for a property owner, both parties can now refer to the same cryptographically verified dataset. Instead of debating whether the revenue numbers are accurate, the proof is on-chain.

The second is tax auditing simplification. If parking revenue data is already flowing through a verifiable pipeline with timestamps and cryptographic proofs, the audit process can move from months of document requests to direct data verification.

The third is RWA cash flow infrastructure. If the cash flows from a parking facility can be proven to be real and accurate, they can be tokenized. This is where ERC-3643 comes in for compliant token issuance, privacy matters for investor and issuer confidentiality, and X402 becomes relevant for machine-readable data oracles that let agents query revenue data programmatically.

Michael also shared two updates. First, Casper is expanding the team to move faster in the RWA space. Second, the team is building tooling for pipeline auditing, meaning tools to verify that the data pipeline itself is operating correctly. Michael described this as “auditing the auditor.”

Parking, he emphasized, is only the proving ground. The same architecture can apply to any industry where fragmented data exists across parties that do not fully trust each other, including real estate, supply chain, hospitality, and healthcare revenue cycles.

Michael then announced the Casper Agentic Buildathon, focused on agentic use cases on Casper, including X402, MCPs, and other agentic toolkits.

The Buildathon will begin with an in-person workshop for Web3 developers at Istanbul Blockchain Week on June 2. The Casper team will guide both experienced and newer Web3 developers through building on Casper, with a focus on AI agentic use cases and interfaces.

“We want developers building agents that transact, not chatbots, not wrappers around LLM APIs,” he said. “Agents that hold value, pay for services, operate within defined boundaries, and settle in Casper.”

The X402 infrastructure that is about to go live will provide the primitives for those applications. Casper also plans to support top projects with up to $100,000 worth of sponsored X402 transactions, so projects launching X402 applications on Casper mainnet will not need to worry about gas costs for some time.

Michael said more details will be shared through official channels in the coming days and weeks.

Q: With X402 and the machine-to-machine economy, Casper is betting heavily on AI. But the network still lacks liquidity and native DeFi tools, while EVM is only expected later this year.

Michael Steuer: Adoption over the next few years means we need to look outside the current crypto market. The total crypto market has mostly been moving within the same range, with money circulating between existing assets. The two areas that can grow the overall pie are tokenized RWAs, bridging digital finance with traditional finance, and the AI agentic machine-to-machine economy, where the number of potential users is effectively limitless.

‍

Q: How do you justify prioritizing a future narrative over the immediate infrastructure needs of developers while waiting for EVM?

Michael Steuer:I don’t think machine-to-machine is a future narrative. It is one of the areas where growth is happening now. On the developer side, Casper already has a strong toolkit, including SDKs, Odra, Casper Cloud, and Casper Click.

‍

Q: Other chains are capturing developer mindshare, liquidity, and active users today. What is Casper’s near-term strategy to bridge that gap?

Michael Steuer: This is essentially the same theme as the previous question. The answer is the same: Casper is focusing on the areas where new growth can come from, while continuing to support developers with the tools already available in the ecosystem.

‍

Q: The roadmap puts X402 first and quantum safety later. Isn’t that backwards for institutions?

Michael Steuer: It’s not backwards. Quantum risk is a global issue, not just a blockchain issue, and the real risk is still years out. Casper’s architecture was designed with cryptographic flexibility in mind, and the plan to introduce quantum-safe keys in 2027 puts Casper ahead of most blockchain peers. Meanwhile, X402 and the machine-to-machine economy are growing rapidly now.

‍

Q: What milestones would signal that Casper is on track for a positive re-rating in the market?

Michael Steuer: The real signal is growing the total pie. The crypto market has mostly been moving money between existing projects, without much new capital entering the space. Casper’s roadmap is aimed at helping expand that market through RWAs and machine-to-machine use cases, and if that succeeds, the network should receive credit for it.

‍

Q: How will gasless transactions and the native token registry drive network activity and token demand?

Michael Steuer: These features map directly to the audiences and use cases described in the Manifest. More utility, more usage, and more participation should positively affect network activity and related metrics.

‍

Q: Which Manifest milestone is the biggest catalyst for institutional adoption?

Michael Steuer: It’s not about one silver bullet. Individual features like EVM, quantum security, or privacy may eventually be found elsewhere. What makes Casper’s approach strong is the combination: EVM, WebAssembly, compliant privacy, RWA infrastructure, smart accounts, and quantum-safe architecture working together as one package.

‍

Q: Would you like to say something about Jean-Claude, your AI agent on X?

Michael Steuer: Jean-Claude is my personal AI agent, and among other things, he has an X account. The public account is only one small part of how I’ve been experimenting with AI agents personally and professionally. We can’t innovate for a future we’re not actively participating in, and the agentic economy is going to be massive.