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 working in early e-commerce, mobile, gaming, and the first wave of Web3. I now serve as CTO and President of the Casper Association.

How has that experience shaped Casper’s direction?
Years of participating in tech adoption cycles taught me to build for real-world fit, not hype. Casper is built to meet enterprise needs, not just early adopters.

What does Casper 2.0 introduce?
Casper 2.0 brings in the Zug Consensus protocol with deterministic finality, upgradable smart contracts, built-in access control, and multi-VM support, all designed for secure, flexible real-world use cases.

Why is developer accessibility such a focus for Casper?
Casper uses Rust and WebAssembly and provides SDKs in JavaScript, Python, Go, and .NET, so millions of existing developers can build on-chain without learning Solidity. We’re simplifying smart contract tooling, lowering the entry barrier, and showcasing how businesses can use Casper without abandoning their current workflows.

How is Casper governed?
Casper is stewarded by a Swiss nonprofit and governed via on-chain voting. Some decisions will even be legally binding under Swiss law, a first in Web3.

Who can submit proposals, and who are the validators?Anyone can submit proposals. Casper has a diverse validator set, from major players like Figment and Everstake to small community-run nodes.

What’s next after 2.0?
Casper 2.1 arrives within 3 months, bringing a second VM with simplified Rust contracts and self-describing contracts that can auto-generate SDKs and UIs.

Why should developers and businesses join now?Casper 2.0 delivers the foundation real-world apps need. It’s developer-friendly, production-ready, and the ecosystem is growing fast. Now is the moment to build.

Community Questions

What are your short-term goals post-2.0?
Driving adoption by supporting projects, releasing tooling updates, and announcing new partnerships in the coming weeks.

What kinds of real-world applications are coming to Casper?
Expect tokenized real estate, IP rights, and compliance-focused RWA tools. EquityBrix, WiseLending, Band Royalty, and others are already building and launching soon.

Are you in touch with regulators for RWA use cases?
Yes. We’re working with regulators in several jurisdictions, and upcoming projects will include regulatory integrations like auditability and compliance layers.

Any campaigns users should know about?Yes, we’re running a Zealy campaign with giveaways. You can join from our X account.

What staking options are available for CSPR holders?You can stake with any validator on cspr.live.

Is Casper planning to burn tokens or reduce supply?
Casper 2.0 includes native token burn functionality. While inactive now, it can be activated by governance, for example, to burn transaction fees.

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I’m currently the CTO and President of the Board of the Casper Association, the nonprofit that helps support and grow the Casper Network. I’ve held this role since late last year, but I was actually one of the original co-founders of the Casper project back in 2018.

Going back further, I started in the early e-commerce industry in Europe in the mid-1990s, during what we now refer to as the Web 1 era. After founding and running some of the earliest e-commerce companies in the Netherlands (my home country), I moved into mobile tech in the late ’90s. Back then, we launched simple SMS-based services, like “Text ABC to 123 to get your horoscope”, which were charged at $0.99 per message.

As networks and devices improved, I helped roll out Japan’s i-mode service in Europe, which was a kind of precursor to the mobile web. Around 2001, I became CTO of mobile at THQ, one of the top three video game publishers in the world at the time. We launched the first downloadable mobile games, which helped kickstart the mobile gaming industry and paved the way for the app economy we know today.

I remained in mobile and social gaming for the next 10–15 years, taking part in the transition to Web2. By 2012–2013, my work in gaming began to intersect with the emerging Web3 world. I was living in Santa Monica, also known as “Silicon Beach”, where many early Web3 projects were starting. Projects like Tether and WAX were literally founded in our office meeting room.

I became a technical advisor and early investor in several of these projects, while still serving as CTO of a social gaming company. When we sold that company in 2016, my part-time obsession with Web3 became a full-time one. In 2018, my partners and I founded the Casper project to bring an enterprise-grade, proof-of-stake blockchain into existence, and that’s how it all began.

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One of the key things I’ve learned through my experience is how adoption cycles work. Especially in the early days of Web3, there was a lot of excitement about what this technology could do. There was this widespread expectation that, within a few months or a couple of years, blockchain would take over the world and everything would run on-chain.

Now, here we are 15 years later, and we’re only just starting to see the real world catch up. But to people who’ve been through earlier tech cycles, that delay is not surprising. That’s just how these things tend to go. You always have early adopters, a lot of trial and error, and then slowly, real companies begin to explore the space.

But, real companies also have very different needs and very different constraints around what they can and cannot do. They’re usually not the fastest movers. The whole “move fast and break things” mindset just doesn’t work in enterprise. Large companies aren’t big fans of that approach.

So, it’s taken time, but I think we’re now at the point where we’re seeing meaningful real-world adoption. The same pattern played out with Web1 and Web2 as well. That’s why I think this is a really exciting time for the industry, we’re starting to see broader, real-world traction.

You need to go through those cycles. And you need to find product-market fit. For adoption to truly take place, you have to meet the real world where it is. That means offering the features and capabilities that businesses actually need, and many of those just weren’t available in the first decade and a half of Web3.

You have to solve real problems, and you need to do it in a way that works for organizations as they exist today. If a company has 10,000 employees, they’re not suddenly going to replace their whole workforce with Solidity developers. They’re going to stick with the tools, processes, and frameworks they already use and trust.

So if you’re introducing new technology, it needs to offer clear, iterative improvements. And if you’re trying to replace something, your solution has to be better than what they already have. Otherwise, there’s just no reason for them to switch.

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For anyone in the audience who may not be familiar, I’ll give a quick overview of the Casper Network before diving into Casper 2.0.

Casper was founded in 2018, and we launched the mainnet in 2021 as a Layer-1 blockchain built on the original proof-of-stake model, one that was initially developed in Ethereum’s research group and then finalized by our own researchers. From day one, the network was designed to support enterprise use cases by focusing on what enterprises actually need to integrate blockchain into their existing stacks. We touched on this 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 engineers, stronger access controls, better workflows around software upgrades, and real modularity.

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

So now, let’s dig into what’s new in Casper 2.0, which we successfully launched on mainnet just a few days ago, last Tuesday, to be precise. One of the most important changes is the introduction of a new consensus protocol called Zug, which brings deterministic finality. That’s different from what you see in most major blockchains today, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, or many of the Layer-2s that your audience is probably familiar with, which all rely on something called probabilistic finality.

In those networks, a block isn’t final immediately after it’s added to the chain. As many of your users probably know, you usually have to wait for multiple confirmations before you can be sure that a transaction won’t be rolled back. And that’s fine when you’re talking about crypto-native use cases, but it’s not ideal for real-world applications where certainty really matters.

That’s where Casper focused its attention, delivering a system that’s 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 final immediately and permanently. That’s essential for things like financial transactions, regulated asset transfers, legal agreements, basically any situation where ambiguity can create risk or liability. When you’re selling a major real estate asset, for instance, you don’t want to be sitting around waiting for 64 confirmations like you would on most other blockchains.

Beyond the new consensus protocol, Casper 2.0 introduces several other major upgrades that really set it apart. For example, we now provide built-in access control, which allows 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, and Casper allows app developers to encode those rules directly into smart contracts, enforced on-chain at the protocol level.

We also have upgradeable smart contracts, which means developers can change their business logic without redeploying or migrating user data. That matters because business requirements change, regulations evolve, and 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 is the introduction of a multi-VM architecture. This means 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. These aren’t rollups or sidechains, each VM runs on the same layer, with its own specialized functionality, but they can still interact with one another 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, use WebAssembly (Wasm) for execution, and offer popular SDKs that make it easier for mainstream developers to build on-chain. I often say that Web3 has maybe 20,000 developers who specialize in these more obscure blockchain-specific languages like Solidity. Someone else recently told me the number might be 22,000. But if you look at the broader world of software development, there are tens of millions of engineers out there who know mainstream programming languages. Casper is focused on enabling them to participate in blockchain development as well.

So for us, this all adds up to a protocol that’s not just designed for the crypto space, but one that’s built to support long-term, real-world systems that need to be secure, flexible, and adaptable.

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Casper supports smart contracts written in Rust using WebAssembly (Wasm). WebAssembly can be compiled from many mainstream programming languages, not just Rust, which means developers don’t have to learn a new blockchain-specific language like Solidity to start building on Casper.

Are you familiar with Stack Overflow? It’s probably the most popular developer forum globally. Every year, they conduct a developer survey where they ask their community about the tools and languages they use. In those surveys, Rust consistently ranks as one of the most popular and beloved programming languages worldwide. Meanwhile, languages like Solidity barely even show up. You’ll find Solidity somewhere near the bottom of the list, and you practically need a magnifying glass to spot it.

The key point is this: instead of focusing on the relatively tiny pool of developers who have worked with Solidity, maybe 20,000 to 30,000 people globally, many of whom have only dabbled in it, we’re building for the tens of millions of engineers who already work in mainstream software environments.

If you think about those 20,000 Solidity developers, many of them aren’t senior engineers in large enterprises. They’re often enthusiasts or solo builders. That’s fine, but it also shows that the blockchain space has unintentionally limited itself. And I think that’s starting to be acknowledged more widely. Even Vitalik has recently talked about the need to replace Solidity and rethink the EVM architecture. There’s a growing realization that Solidity’s adoption has stalled, and if we want real-world traction, we need to move beyond it.

So, to answer your question on SDKs: we have SDKs available in familiar languages like JavaScript, Go, .NET, and Python. And beyond that, our developer tooling is built to feel like modern software engineering. Casper supports modular development and automated testing out of the box. The goal is to make blockchain development feel like regular development to lower the entry barrier significantly.

Because ultimately, we believe that real innovation will only happen when blockchain becomes accessible to the broader software industry, not just to a niche group of Web3 specialists who often operate outside traditional enterprise environments.

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The Casper Association, as you might’ve guessed from the name “Zug”, is a Swiss nonprofit organization. It’s responsible for supporting the ongoing development and long-term health of the Casper Network.

The Association helps guide the technical direction of the network toward real-world utility, enabling systems to be built on-chain with the auditability, upgradability, and access controls we discussed earlier. We also help ensure that core protocol developers working on the Casper protocol can collaborate effectively across different teams.

We make sure that application developers have the documentation and tools they need to build on Casper, and that node operators, including validators and exchange partners like KuCoin, have everything they need to run their nodes reliably.

Beyond that, the Casper Association has a clear mandate to promote maximum decentralization of both the network and the protocol. And for us, that’s not just a principle, it’s something we are actively working on every day.

We strongly believe that decentralization means giving the community a real voice in governance. In recent months, we’ve announced and begun implementing on-chain governance mechanisms that allow CSPR token holders to directly influence decisions about the project.

Of course, since Genesis, Casper has operated as a proof-of-stake network, so validators have always had the power to decide which upgrades get accepted and launched on the network. But now, those validators, who represent the people that stake their CSPR with them, can also vote on other key governance topics that affect not just the protocol, but the broader project, including the Association itself.

Several on-chain votes have already taken place, and we expect this governance activity to increase in the coming months.

In parallel to that, we’re also making changes to the way the Casper Association is governed. We are integrating on-chain governance mechanisms into the legal structure of the Association itself. To our knowledge, this has never been done before in our industry.

What that means in practice is that certain decisions made via on-chain voting will be legally binding for the Association, recognized as such by Swiss authorities. This represents a significant step forward for Web3 governance and shows what’s possible when decentralized systems intersect with real-world legal frameworks.

Switzerland has been incredibly welcoming in this regard, and we’re working with top-tier legal teams to design this governance model in a way that is literally enforceable under Swiss law. It’s a very exciting development, and we believe it sets a new standard for how blockchain projects can bridge Web3 and the real world.

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The first part is fairly straightforward: it can come from anywhere. Yes, the Casper Association may put forward proposals, especially for things like network or protocol upgrades. A simple example would be publishing an upgrade on GitHub and asking the validator community to either accept or reject it.

Validators accept an upgrade by staging it on their nodes. If they don’t, it doesn’t go live. For any protocol upgrade to be finalized, at least 67% of the stake on the network must accept it. If that threshold isn’t reached, the upgrade fails. That’s the simplest and most common form of on-chain decision-making.

But proposals aren’t limited to upgrades. Anyone can come up with a proposal and initiate an on-chain vote around it. And in some cases, depending on the proposal, there are mechanisms in place that make the outcome legally binding for the Association, as I mentioned earlier.

As for our validator landscape, it’s actually quite diverse. We have large validator companies that validate on many different chains. Organizations like Figment and Everstake are examples. These are professional outfits with deep infrastructure and a presence across the staking ecosystem.

But on the other end of the spectrum, we also have small, independent “mom-and-pop” validators, individuals or small teams who run a single Casper node, and Casper is their only project. Many of them are active community members, very vocal in our Telegram groups, and incredibly supportive of end users.

So it’s a mixed environment, and that’s a good thing. Between the large, well-known staking firms and the small grassroots validators, we have a really strong, diverse validator community.,

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As I mentioned, we launched Casper 2.0 on mainnet just five days ago. The upgrade went completely seamlessly, which was a massive milestone for us. It was two years in the making and involved hundreds of thousands of lines of code added or modified in the Casper protocol. So it’s a huge accomplishment for our engineering team.

But with 2.0 now in the rearview mirror, we’re already moving forward. Casper 2.1 is already underway. While Casper 2.0 took nearly two years to develop, we’re now shifting to a quarterly protocol release schedule. You should expect to see Casper 2.1 go live on the 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 our existing one under the multi-VM architecture. This new VM will offer an even more simplified smart contract interface for developers. It also introduces new capabilities like self-describing contracts, which can automatically generate SDKs and even applications based on embedded metadata.

You can imagine the potential this unlocks, especially when combined with AI-driven development workflows or applications that dynamically spawn new contracts. It’s a very exciting direction for us.

On the use case side, we’re also looking forward to several new project announcements in the coming weeks, so we’re not even talking about a 12-to-18-month horizon; some of these are right around the corner.

As you might expect based on our discussion, the focus is primarily on real-world assets, both in terms of tokenization and in governance and compliance use cases. These are the areas where Casper 2.0 really shines, and in our view, they’ll be the main drivers of real-world adoption going forward. That’s also where we’re putting our focus.

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We truly believe that the release of Casper 2.0 marks the beginning of an entirely new phase, not just for Casper, but hopefully for the broader blockchain industry. With this upgrade, we finally have a blockchain that meets the real world where it is.

Casper now supports layered ownership, governance, and compliance, all natively enforced on-chain. That opens up a whole new category of applications that simply weren’t possible before.

So if you’re a developer, we’d love to have you in the ecosystem. You can get started by visiting docs.casper.network. We have tutorials available, and you’ll see just how easy it is to build an end-to-end blockchain application using the languages and methodologies you’re already familiar with.

If you’re a KuCoin 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, along with a dozen or so other language-specific groups. My team and I are always excited to meet new members of the Casper community. you’ll find us there.

And if you’re an enterprise, business, or Web3 project looking to start building real-world use cases, come meet us at Consensus 2025 in Toronto this week. I’ll be flying in tomorrow and will be there all week. We’re actively looking to forge new partnerships for the Casper Network, and we’d love to connect.

You can also reach out to me directly on X, my DMs are open.

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I like that, it’s a good strategic question. First, I think it’s important to say that every project should have a long-term vision and mission. Without it, you can’t really judge where you’re going. You need to have that long-term direction in mind in order to make the right short-term decisions.

For us, I believe the long-term vision and mission have been made clear throughout this AMA. We’re focused on meeting the needs of real-world applications by delivering infrastructure that supports ownership, compliance, and governance on-chain.

In the short term, our focus is on delivering step-by-step progress toward that vision. As I mentioned earlier, you’ll see some announcements in the very near future, these are concrete milestones that align with that long-term mission. So our short-term goals are all about enabling that adoption, one step at a time.

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Definitely. There are several different types of partners involved with the network.

First, there’s our validator community, who are closely involved with everything related to the protocol and the network. We just completed a major upgrade with Casper 2.0, and many of these validators had been involved in testing and preparing for it for months, some even longer. Now that the upgrade is live, several of them are coming together to build new monitoring systems and improve the operational side of the node infrastructure. It’s great to see that kind of initiative from the community.

On the business side, our partnerships are very focused on real-world use cases. We’ve previously announced projects in the tokenization of intellectual property, for example, Band Royalty. One of our partners is EquityBrix, a platform that facilitates deals for real-world assets,  and they’ll be tokenizing those assets on Casper.

We’re also working with WiseLending, one of the top liquidity providers on Uniswap. They have a real-world asset vault where they tokenize cell towers and provide a strong yield for participants. Essentially, they turn these physical infrastructures into on-chain investment instruments.

There’s a lot happening in this space, and we’ll be announcing additional partnerships and projects in the very near future. So definitely stay tuned.

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We are in touch with the regulator in Zug, but not specifically on this topic. However, we are in contact with regulators in other jurisdictions when it comes to real-world asset use cases.

Some of the projects we’ll be launching and announcing soon will indeed have a regulatory component. These involve things like auditability and direct interactions with local regulators to ensure compliance. So, yes, the short answer is: we are.

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Yes, absolutely. We’ve been ramping up what I’d call our retail-focused marketing significantly over the past few weeks, especially around the Casper 2.0 launch. And that’s something we plan to continue in the weeks and months ahead.

As we bring new partners and projects online, we try to focus on amplifying those efforts because, at the end of the day, adoption is what matters. And the best way to support adoption is to make sure the projects building on Casper are successful.

There’s currently a Zealy campaign going on, which is quite similar to Gleam. If you check our X account, you’ll find links to participate. There are giveaways tied to the campaign, so it’s definitely worth checking out.

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Since Casper is a proof-of-stake network, staking is absolutely central to the security of the protocol.

You can stake your CSPR with any of the validators on our network. The APY is variable, based on the total percentage of supply that is staked. Currently, that APY sits at around 15–16%, which is relatively high compared to many other proof-of-stake protocols.

If you visit cspr.live, one of our main block explorers, you can track that APY in real time and stake directly with any validator.

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Yes. One of the features introduced in Casper 2.0 is native token burning functionality.

This feature allows developers to tap into token burning mechanisms, but more importantly, it opens up the potential for future governance decisions. For example, the community could vote to activate a deflationary model where all transaction fees are burned.

This functionality is available right now, however, the deflationary model of burning transaction fees is not active.  It might become active if the community decides to activate it. Every other aspect of burning is usable.

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