You can view the full version of each answer by clicking on the corresponding question.

Who is Michael Steuer, and what brought him to Casper?
Michael is the CTO and Board President of the Casper Association, and one of the project’s original co-founders. His background spans early e-commerce, mobile gaming, and social platforms, and he’s been involved in Web3 since 2012, working with teams like Tether and WAX before founding Casper in 2018.

What is Casper 2.0, and why was it such a major upgrade?
Casper 2.0 introduces the Zug consensus with deterministic finality, transactions are final the moment they’re added. Other improvements include built-in access control, multi-VM support, and enhanced developer accessibility.

How did Halborn contribute to securing the Casper 2.0 upgrade?
The upgrade went live seamlessly thanks to months of preparation, including a deep four-month collaboration with Halborn, which audited core protocol components and specific exploit vectors, applying their end-to-end understanding of both Casper’s internals and app-layer behaviors.

What does “Casper empowers people to benefit from who they are, what they do, and what they own” mean?
It’s a values-driven mission: blockchain should quietly power real-world processes and give users agency, not just traders and developers, but everyone. Casper is built to support people, real infrastructure, and businesses, just like networks such as Visa or GSM quietly power today’s world.

Who is Casper 2.0 really built for?
Casper 2.0 is designed for real-world companies and users, not just crypto insiders. Casper targets sectors where blockchain can add transparency, efficiency, and liquidity to complex and often outdated processes.

What’s next after Casper 2.0?
Casper 2.1 is launching in the next three months with a second VM and self-describing contracts that can generate SDKs and even full apps automatically, opening the door for AI-driven workflows and makes blockchain development even more accessible for mainstream engineers.

How can developers, users, or businesses get involved with Casper?
Developers can start at docs.casper.network to find tutorials and guides using familiar tools. Users can follow @Casper_Network and join the Telegram community, while businesses can reach out directly to explore building real-world use cases.

Nice to be here, thank you for having me. I spent quite some time with your team at Consensus last week in Toronto, which was nice. It’s always good to be with Halborn, and as you mentioned, we’ve been working together for, I think, about three years now. So again, excited to be here.

You asked who I am and what I do, and why I’m here. I’m the CTO and President of the Casper Association.

Background-wise, I started my journey into technology back in the mid-90s, during the early days of Web1, although we didn’t call it that at the time. 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.

From there, I transitioned into mobile technology, rolling out SMS-based services and later bringing Japan’s i-mode platform to Europe, which was a kind of predecessor to the mobile web. Then, I became the CTO for mobile at THQ, which was one of the top three video game publishers globally at the time. There, we put the first downloadable mobile games on cell phones, back in 2001, which was really the start of the mobile gaming industry. That era laid the foundation for what would become the mobile app economy we’re all part of today.

Later, I moved into social and mobile gaming and was part of the Web2 wave. Then, around 2012, while living in Silicon Beach, or Santa Monica, I started getting involved in early blockchain and Web3 projects. I worked with teams behind Tether and WAX, two of the very early innovators in the space, as well as many other projects that were starting up around Silicon Beach.

After we sold the social gaming company I was CTO of in 2016, I made Web3 my full-time focus. And by 2018, we had identified a very clear gap: there wasn’t really a Layer-1 blockchain that truly met enterprise needs. That’s what led me to co-found Casper.

So I was one of the co-founders back in 2018, helped start up the project, then operationally stepped back for a few years. I came back in as the CTO and President of the Casper Association late last year.

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 Maybe for your audience who might not be familiar with Casper at all, I’ll start by explaining what Casper 1.0 was , or rather, what Casper as a blockchain is.

Casper was founded in 2018. We launched mainnet in 2021 as a Layer-1 blockchain that was built on top of the original proof-of-stake model, one that was first developed in the Ethereum research group and then finalized by our own Casper researchers.

From day one, the network was designed to support enterprise use cases by focusing on what enterprises 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 mainstream programming languages instead of Solidity, so companies don’t have to retrain their entire engineering team, strong access controls, better workflows around software upgrades, and real modularity. 

That enterprise foundation is exactly what shaped Casper 2.0 and what now positions it so well to enable the next generation of real-world applications and users.

So for Casper 2.0, which we successfully launched on mainnet, I think it’s exactly two weeks ago now, it’s obviously a major version upgrade of the Casper protocol. But considering the number of changes, new features, and improvements that were included, it’s probably one of the biggest upgrades of a live protocol in the blockchain space.

I’ll walk you through what’s included.

One of the most important changes is the introduction of a new consensus protocol called Zug, which brings deterministic finality. For those unfamiliar with the term, most major blockchains today, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many of the Layer-1s your audience might be familiar with, all rely on something called probabilistic finality.

In those networks, a block isn’t really final, certainly not immediately. As you’re probably familiar with, when you send a transaction to an exchange, they make you wait for multiple confirmations before they’re confident that the transaction is final. In Ethereum, for example, they often say, “Wait for 64 confirmations.” In Bitcoin, it’s a lower number, but with a 10-minute block time, it still means you’re waiting 30 to 60 minutes before your funds are released.

That’s fine for crypto-native use cases, but it’s really not ideal for real-world applications, where certainty truly matters. That’s what Casper focused on , delivering a system more suitable for real-world use cases through deterministic finality.

With Zug, the network reaches agreement the moment a block is produced and accepted. There’s no waiting period. Once a block is finalized, it’s immediately and permanently final. That’s essential for things like financial transactions, regulated asset transfers, legal agreements, basically any situation where ambiguity could create risk or liability. If you’re selling a major real estate asset, for example, you don’t want to be sitting around waiting for 64 confirmations to know whether the seller still owns it or the buyer has acquired it. That kind of limbo state doesn’t really exist in the real world.

Beyond the new consensus protocol, Casper 2.0 introduced several other major upgrades that really set it apart.

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 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. Casper allows app developers to encode those rules directly into smart contracts , and they’re enforced on-chain at the protocol level. These are not functions developers have to manually manage inside contracts, which also improves security.

We also have upgradeable 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. Regulations evolve , especially where I am, in California in the United States. Regulations change probably on an annual basis, if not more often, depending on elections or other governance shifts. Companies need to be able to respond to those changes transparently and securely. Casper was built with that in mind, and the protocol provides this functionality natively.

Another big step forward in Casper 2.0, and this is something Halborn also worked closely with us on, is the introduction of a multi-VM architecture. This means that different execution environments can now run side by side on the same network. That’s useful because different types of applications have different needs, and now they can coexist within the same Layer-1.

To be clear, these aren’t rollups, sidechains, or Layer-2s. 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 targeting other VMs. It’s all fully compatible within a unified protocol.

And finally, I’ll mention something that’s always been a priority for us, developer friendliness. We support Rust as a programming language. We use WebAssembly, or Wasm, for execution, which means many mainstream programming languages can compile to it. We offer popular SDKs in mainstream languages so that any modern developer can build on-chain.

I think the stat that many people have heard is that Web3 has maybe 20,000 developers who specialize in these more obscure languages like Solidity. But if you look at the broader software world, there are tens of millions of engineers out there who know mainstream programming languages. These are the people who work at real-world companies , and real-world companies don’t have Solidity engineers on staff. Casper is focused on enabling those tens of millions of software engineers to step into blockchain development as well.

So these are the highlights. There’s a lot more, of course , but for us, this all adds up to a very, very major protocol upgrade. Casper 2.0 isn’t just designed for the crypto space; it’s built to support long-term, real-world systems that need to be secure, flexible, and adaptable.

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First of all, rolling out a major version upgrade on a live network is not for the faint of heart. This upgrade went live on the mainnet two weeks ago, and it all went seamlessly and without any hiccups, which when you roll something out to the mainnet, is not something you take for granted.

You asked earlier what’s been keeping me up. I didn’t sleep well the night before the mainnet upgrade. That wasn’t necessarily because of security concerns, but more about the fact that going to mainnet is just fundamentally different from working in testing environments. It’s not easy to simulate the circumstances of mainnet, you’ve got validators all over the world, running on different types of hardware, different types of data centers, and operating in a state that’s very hard to replicate.

The fact that everything went as smoothly as it did is really a function of very, very good preparation, and our security collaboration with Halborn was a major part of that. You mentioned that we’ve been working together for years, and that’s true. You guys are super familiar with our protocol and our codebase. You don’t only work with us on the security of the protocol itself, we also work with you on many of the ecosystem projects that launch on Casper.

That means you’re end-to-end experts. You understand the internal details of the node and the protocol, but you also know what it takes to develop on top of the protocol. That means if you want to try and break the protocol, to see if any vectors might be exploitable, you have the experience it takes to build applications on top of it that might not behave the way one would expect. That’s a big advantage for a security firm to have, versus just looking in an almost academic way at the protocol and the source code of the node software. You have that leg up.

You also asked what we were testing for. Obviously, Casper had a well-publicized security issue last year, in July 2023. That was definitely top of mind when we were working with you on auditing Casper 2.0. We wanted to see if a similar issue could be exploited post-upgrade.

So we focused on general security auditing with you. We definitely leveraged your experience, building on top of the protocol. And there were some very specific vectors and exploit hypotheses that we wanted to test with you.

Overall, I think our project together on Casper 2.0 lasted about four months. It was a very in-depth, detailed, and highly collaborative effort, and we’re very pleased with the results. Very appreciative.

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Sure. There are a lot of motivations for people to build within the Web3 context, and many of those motivations are perhaps short-term and self-serving. They don’t necessarily support a sustainable, long-term vision for a thriving ecosystem.

For us, we’re in this because we believe there is massive relevance to distributed ledger technology in the real world over the long term. That relevance needs to reach and benefit everyone participating in the real world.

And I’m actually going to take it beyond Web3 and into the broader world. When we talk about people, I’m not just talking about degens. If you step outside of your office, you’ll find some people have never done anything with blockchain. In fact, that’s the majority of people.

What we’re working toward is a world where blockchain becomes a part of everyday life, a technology that empowers processes, companies, and people to do things better.

When you, as a consumer, go to the supermarket and pay for your groceries, you don’t think , not even for a split second, about whether your payment went over the SWIFT network, or MasterCard, or Visa, or whatever the case may be. You just expect the payment to go through. You don’t even think about it.

Similarly, and I don’t know if you were very tech-focused back in the ’90s, but back then, everyone knew what kind of mobile network their phone used. Was it GSM or CDMA? Was it 1G, 2G, or 2.5G? People compared technologies, debated them, and had preferences. Today, nobody thinks about that anymore. Nobody thinks about the protocols running behind their phone. They just expect it to work.

That’s the kind of world we’re working toward in Web3. Blockchain is there, in the background, making things better , empowering people, empowering companies.

And it shouldn’t be about the technology discussion anymore. It should be about: How do we empower people? How do we make things better in the long run? How do we enable all of that?

That’s really what Casper is about.

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We really believe that we’re on the precipice of real-world integration, and I think a lot of recent developments reinforce that belief. Just look at what’s been happening over the last year: institutions are finally getting behind crypto, at least as an asset class. That’s a strong signal for where things are heading. Once institutional money enters the space, once companies start putting crypto assets on their balance sheets, there’s a level of acceptance that we just didn’t have before.

But ultimately, it’s real companies and real people that blockchain needs to serve in a meaningful way. And that has to go beyond the typical degen use cases, just trading and speculation. Blockchain needs to provide real value.

For example, we just announced last week that we’re working with one of the leaders in the U.S. parking industry to bring the $140 billion per year U.S. parking sector on-chain. That industry, as you might imagine, is not particularly high-tech. It runs on a lot of trust and antiquated processes. There are many different stakeholders with conflicting interests.

I didn’t know much about the parking industry until recently, but here’s how it works:

You have parking lot owners. Then you have the operators , the companies that run the parking lots. Think of those massive airport parking structures. Then some aggregators resell parking spaces inside those lots. You also have regulators involved. For airport lots, the owner or operator might have to pay taxes and fees to both the city and the airport authority.

There are probably five to ten adversarial or semi-adversarial parties in that value chain. And there’s just a massive opportunity to improve transparency, auditability, and reporting, all of which blockchain can help enable.

Then there’s the second layer to it: these parking lots are yield-bearing assets. If you own a parking structure at an airport with 2,000 to 5,000 spaces, I mean, I know how much I have to pay every time I park at the airport, you can imagine how much consistent revenue those structures generate. So there’s real potential to tokenize these kinds of assets and create liquidity for them.

This is a core value prop of blockchain: turning illiquid real-world assets into liquid ones. Real estate and physical infrastructure are the biggest asset classes in the world. They’re exponentially larger than any digital asset class. So this is where the biggest opportunity lies, and that’s who we’re building for.

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Sure. As I mentioned earlier, we just launched Casper 2.0 on mainnet two weeks ago, so it’s still pretty fresh. But with 2.0 now in our rearview mirror, we’re already moving forward and actively working on Casper 2.1.

Casper 2.0 took nearly two years to develop, and it was a major, major effort, as you pointed out. But now, we’re shifting to a quarterly protocol release schedule. You should expect to see Casper 2.1 go live on mainnet within the next three months.

One of the key innovations coming in 2.1 will be the introduction of a second virtual machine, running in parallel with the existing VM under our new multi-VM architecture. This new VM will offer a more simplified smart contract interface for developers, making it even easier and more accessible to build on Casper.

The 2.1 release also introduces new capabilities like self-describing contracts, which can automatically generate SDKs and even full applications based on embedded metadata. You can imagine the kind of potential this unlocks, especially when combined with AI-driven development workflows, for example, applications that can dynamically spawn new contracts for themselves. It’s a very exciting direction for us.

Beyond that, we’re extremely focused on driving adoption. We just announced the parking industry partnership last week, and there will be more announcements coming soon. We’re actively working with our partners to implement these solutions, help them succeed, and in doing so, move the project, the protocol, and the broader ecosystem forward, and hopefully, help advance Web3 more broadly.

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Absolutely. I’d love for your listeners to become part of the Casper community.

If you’re a developer, we’d love to have you in our ecosystem. Visit docs.casper.network, where you’ll find tutorials and guides showing how easy it is to build end-to-end blockchain applications using languages and tools you’re already familiar with.

If you’re a user and want to learn more about Casper, follow us on X at Casper_Network and join our Telegram community. We have a main English-language group and a dozen or so local-language groups, so wherever you are in the world, you’ll likely find a Casper group you’ll be comfortable in. My team and I are always excited to meet new members.

And if you’re a business or Web3 project looking to build real-world use cases, reach out to us, or reach out to me directly. 

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