Michael began by introducing Casper and explaining the assumptions behind its creation.

Casper Association is a Swiss nonprofit based in Zug, where it shares an office building with the Ethereum Foundation and several other blockchain organizations. Michael noted that many of these projects might otherwise have been established in the United States had clearer regulatory conditions existed at the time.

Casper was founded in 2018, drawing on proof-of-stake research originally developed within the Ethereum Foundation. At the time, Ethereum’s transition from proof of work was still years away. The team behind Casper believed there was an opportunity not only to bring proof-of-stake infrastructure to market sooner, but also to design a blockchain around a different set of long-term priorities.

Back then, the industry was focused on ICOs and other short-lived market cycles. Casper’s founders, however, were looking further ahead.

They expected businesses, enterprises, and financial institutions to eventually need reliable public blockchain rails. That’s why the team behind Casper dealt witht these questions, which were not yet central to the broader market:

• How quickly could ownership be established after a transaction? 
• Could applications change as laws and business requirements changed?
• Could an organization reproduce its internal governance structure on-chain?
• Could transaction costs remain predictable enough to support a real operating model?

Michael used institutional settlement to illustrate the difference. A consumer transferring a relatively small amount to an exchange may tolerate waiting through numerous confirmations, but a financial institution moving billions of dollars cannot accept a prolonged period in which ownership remains uncertain. That premise shaped Casper’s architecture from the beginning.

The conversation then moved to Casper’s listing on Kraken and why access to the U.S. market is so important.

U.S. residents had limited opportunities to participate in the network during much of its first five years. Michael attributed that absence largely to the country’s uncertain regulatory environment.

With the listing on Kraken, CSPR became available to eligible U.S. users at the same time lawmakers in Washington were working toward clearer digital asset rules. 

"We started building Casper eight years ago, assuming that those rules would come. So many chains are retrofitting to become compliant, and we’re just ready."

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Michael described Casper as new to many U.S. market participants, but not a new network. It arrives with five years of Mainnet operation, an established international presence, and infrastructure designed around the requirements now moving to the center of the industry.

When asked what makes Casper different from the many Layer 1 networks that describe themselves as ready for institutional adoption, Michael outlined the protocol decisions that support that claim.

1. Deterministic single-block finality

Institutions cannot operate efficiently when transactions remain in limbo for several minutes or require dozens of confirmations. Beyond speed, this creates a legal and operational question: during that window, which party is responsible for the asset?

Casper was designed to provide definitive finality without waiting through a long confirmation period. Once a block is finalized, ownership is settled.

Learn more about Casper’s deterministic finality

2. Upgradable smart contracts

Immutability is one of blockchain’s defining properties, but businesses and financial applications do not remain static. Regulations change, products evolve.  Applications downloaded from an app store receive continuous updates, and Michael argued that on-chain applications need the same ability to evolve.

Many blockchain ecosystems have introduced workarounds that allow immutable contracts to be modified indirectly, but those workarounds can introduce new risks and have contributed to some of the exploits seen across the industry.

Casper instead supports smart contract upgrades at the protocol level, with governance built into the process

Learn more about Casper’s upgradable smart contracts

3. Permissions & Access Controls

In a traditional organization, different employees receive different responsibilities and levels of access. A CEO, finance team member, administrator, and receptionist do not have identical authority. 

On many blockchains, however, control is determined almost entirely by possession of a private key.

Casper allows organizations to reproduce more sophisticated governance structures. Roles, permissions, responsibilities, and access levels can be assigned in a way that more closely reflects how companies already operate.

Learn more about Casper’s native access controls

Michael also emphasized predictable transaction costs. A business needs to forecast its operating expenses. If the cost of executing the same transaction can rise tenfold or one hundredfold because of activity elsewhere on the network, building a scalable financial product becomes much more difficult.

On Casper, the same transaction is designed to carry the same cost regardless of changing network conditions. That predictability gives businesses a more stable foundation for planning and pricing their products.

Michael then addressed quantum security, another issue Casper considered during its original design.

For institutions with investment, custody, or infrastructure horizons extending beyond the current decade, quantum readiness is not a distant concern. 

Michael cited changing estimates around Q-Day, the point at which quantum computing could threaten widely used cryptographic systems, and argued that organizations need credible answers before the threat becomes immediate.

Casper’s answer was to avoid locking the protocol into a single cryptographic approach from the outset.

"We foresaw this in 2018 and built pluggable cryptography into the protocol. We already support multiple algorithms on mainnet, so adding quantum-safe algorithms is essentially a plug-and-play exercise for Casper."

Before moving to AI-driven commerce, Michael added another important piece to Casper’s real-world asset strategy: support for ERC-3643.

ERC-3643 is an emerging standard for permissioned and compliant tokenization. It enables identity requirements, transfer restrictions, and other rules attached to regulated assets to be enforced as part of the token itself.

Michael explained that many tokenized financial assets already use infrastructure based on this standard, and Casper has become the first non-Ethereum Layer 1 to support it.

He also discussed Casper’s participation in the upcoming T-REX Ledger, previously associated with Tokeny before its acquisition by Apex Group. Apex operates infrastructure and back-office services across a significant portion of the global financial sector.

Michael said the pipeline connected to Apex alone is expected to contribute more than $100 billion in assets by early 2027.

The interview then shifted to the intersection of AI agents and blockchain infrastructure.

Michael had already raised the subject during the earlier roundtable discussion, referring to Cloudflare data indicating that automated and agentic activity now represents a growing share of internet traffic.

"We as humans have become a minority on our own Internet, but nobody’s equipped to handle commerce."

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AI agents can search, analyze, communicate, and make decisions, but the internet’s existing payment infrastructure was designed around human behavior. It assumes someone can open a bank account, enter card information, approve a transaction, or manage a recurring subscription. Autonomous agents cannot reliably operate through those workflows.

Originally introduced by Coinbase, x402 enables payments to be initiated through ordinary HTTP requests, allowing digital services and autonomous software to exchange value directly.

The standard is now being advanced under the Linux Foundation. Casper is a co-founding member of the x402 Foundation alongside organizations including Coinbase, Google, Mastercard, and Visa.

Casper is also among the relatively small number of blockchain networks with x402 functionality integrated on Mainnet.

Michael stressed that enabling an AI agent to spend money solves only part of the problem. Organizations also need to control how that capital can be used.

An agent might be permitted to spend no more than a set amount each day, or make purchases only from approved services. Those restrictions need to remain enforceable even when the agent itself acts autonomously.

"Giving them access to capital is one thing. Guardrails are a completely other thing."

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Casper’s existing approach to permissions and on-chain governance can be applied to these agentic payment environments, explained Michael. Spending limits, time restrictions, entitlements, and approved venues can be enforced at the protocol level rather than relying entirely on the software operating the agent.

Michael presented this as Casper’s contribution to the wider x402 effort: not only helping agents transact, but helping enterprises deploy them with the controls required for serious economic activity.

The conversation then returned to the CLARITY Act and the prospects for digital asset legislation in the United States.

Michael described the immediate political outlook as uncertain. Based on conversations with people in Washington, he had heard both optimism and pessimism, and placed the near-term odds at roughly even. Regardless of the immediate outcome, however, he argued that a market structure framework would eventually pass in some form. The political and economic pressure for clearer digital asset rules is not going away.

Michael rejected the idea that regulation is inherently opposed to innovation.

"I’ve spent 30 years making new technology safe enough for serious organizations to take a bet on. And serious organizations need rules. And rules really aren’t the enemy of adoption. They’re essentially a prerequisite."

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Clear rules would not guarantee adoption on their own. They would, however, establish the conditions serious institutions need before committing capital, infrastructure, and long-term strategy to the sector.

With CSPR now available to eligible U.S. users, compliant tokenization pipelines beginning to take shape, x402 live on Mainnet, and regulatory clarity moving closer, the assumptions behind Casper’s original design are becoming the requirements of the market in front of it.

For a complete overview of the protocol upgrades, products, integrations, and ecosystem developments Casper delivered during the second quarter of 2026 alone, read Michael Steuer’s full Q2 2026 recap on X.