Gate.io AMA with Casper -Blockchain for the Builders
Time: Aug 16th, 2022, 13:00 UTC
Gate.io hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with Mrinal Manohar,CEO of CasperLabs and Ralf Kubli,Board Member of Casper Association in the Gate.io Exchange Community.
Official Website: https://www.casperblockchain.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Casper_Network
Follow Casper on Discord and Telegram
Guests
Mrinal Manohar — CEO of CasperLabs
Mrinal Manohar is a noted computer scientist and finance leader. After receiving a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, Mrinal spent time at Bain & Co., Bain Capital, and Sagard Holdings, where he ran the TMT sector of this $1B+ long-only hedge fund. Mrinal has been a supporter of open-source computing for almost two decades; he was an early contributor to the BitTorrent project, mined Bitcoin in college, and was a seed-stage investor in Ethereum, Blockstack, Basis, MakerDAO, and many other early blockchain projects.
Ralf Kubli — Board Member of Casper Association
Ralf Kubli is a board member of the Casper Association. The Casper Association is the steward of the Casper Network. Ralf started to be in Blockchain in 2016 and has a wide background in technology, and finance.
Q&A from Gate.io
Q1: Could you please give us a brief introduction about yourselves?
Mrinal: Sure thing. Hello everyone. My name is Mrinal Manohar, and I am the CEO and one of the co-founders of CasperLabs. I’m both an engineer as well as an ex Wall Street investor. After receiving a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, I spent time at Bain & Co., Bain Capital, and Sagard Holdings, where I ran the TMT sector of a $1B+ long-only hedge fund. Even though we started CasperLabs in 2018, I have been a supporter of open-source computing for almost two decades; I was an early contributor to the BitTorrent project, and was a seed-stage investor in Ethereum, Blockstack, Basis, MakerDAO, and many other early blockchain projects.
CasperLabs first started building the Casper codebase in October 2018, and we facilitated the Casper Testnet in 2020 until mainnet launch in March of last year. While the engineers at CasperLabs continue to contribute new features for the Casper blockchain, CasperLabs is also a fully staffed enterprise consultancy business, providing support and services for its enterprise clients building on Casper. We work closely with our customers in understanding their needs, and how we can provide a technical solution for them that uses Casper. CasperLabs is a Swiss-based AG and currently has ~80 full time employees, primarily developers and engineers, who live and work all over the world.
It’s really great to be here in the Gate community today. Many thanks to our host for having us - and to all of you for being here with us.
Ralf: Hi, I am Ralf Kubli, one of the Board Members of Casper Association. My professional career has been spent both in large companies and in startups. I began in Web2 building websites and browsing the world, when everything was open and accessible. I then spent 18 years in large companies in management positions. I first came across Blockchain in 2016 and then joined a Venture Capital firm, and now support several Web3 organizations as a board member.
The Casper Association is the not-for-profit, Switzerland-domiciled organization which is responsible for overseeing the network and supporting its organic evolution and continued decentralization. In essence, we are the steward of the open source protocol, and as such, we advance the development of the network with the core team at CasperLabs and other parties which can contribute to the protocol. Membership in the Association is composed of the independent validators which run nodes on the Casper Network. The Association currently has 12 full time staff members.
I am personally very excited about Web3 and Blockchain - in particular, Casper! - can do to enable developers, builders and creators to really change the world.
Q2: Could you please briefly explain what Casper is and tell us a little about how it is different from other layer 1s?
Mrinal: Yes, absolutely. The Casper Network is a layer 1 blockchain and Turing-complete WASM based smart-contracting platform, backed by the only operational CBC-Casper Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm - known as Highway (Soon to be upgraded to “Zug” in Casper 2.0). Casper is a permission-less, decentralized, public blockchain.
The Network has been built and optimized for enterprise and developer adoption from the ground up. Fundamentally, any commercial enterprise and any size project that is seeking to build an application using technology is going to need control over their own chain contracts, support their customers, and some guarantees that the protocol will continue to adapt and evolve as their needs change. Casper allows enterprises and developers to integrate blockchain technology into their existing s and development processes seamlessly. Many other Layer 1 protocols believe that a full replacement of the technology stack is in order in order to make these s “blockchain ready” or “blockchain centric.” We believe that replacement of existing s is not feasible. Rather, software is governed and developed incrementally, and the Casper technology provides for this, without sacrificing security. This is possible because of the capabilities that the Casper blockchain provides.
As a pure proof-of-stake network, Casper supports a variety of network installations. An enterprise can choose to use a hybrid deployment of Casper (Which uses mainnet) or use the mainnet directly. Key properties of how the blockchain runs can be configured at startup, and modified by a seamless upgrade process. This applies to all deployments of Casper, including mainnet. It is completely possible to move from a private, to a hybrid, to a consortium or even public network without having to restart the network. Enterprises do not need to feel locked into a particular deployment of the blockchain, they have the flexibility to include more participants as their needs change.
Going beyond the flexibility, control and power of the smart contracting platform, the Casper technology has been built for sustainability, with a modular architecture that allows for swapping out of consensus protocols, ution environments, and cryptographic encryption schemes. This is extremely important for the long term health of the protocol, and as new research and developments take place in these areas, Casper is well positioned to take advantage of future innovation in the space. Because of all of this, enterprises and blockchain native companies alike are partnering with us to build on Casper.
Here is a slide which shows the major issues with other/older layer one blockchains as well as the ways that Casper solves these problems.
Q3: Ralf, moving to the Casper Association, will you please tell us what are the Association’s primary objectives currently?
Ralf: Sure. The Casper Association in 2022 is focused on four major areas: network growth/upgrades, tokens on Casper, NFTs, and R&D. Please allow me to elaborate on each…
- Casper Network and eco development through coordinated network upgrades, documentation resources and educational material. Validators and node operators will be well informed and have access to required resources. Here is a look at just how robust the Casper Eco already is!
The enablement of tokens built on top of Casper (similar to ERC20 tokens on Ethereum but with better security & performance), with standards-based token issuance, as easy to use as ERC-20, tokens can easily be created on Casper with better security and performance, and the mechanisms exist to efficiently bring dApps from Ethereum & other chains.
Supporting the growth of the NFT Eco on Casper. We firmly believe NFTs will fundamentally change how economies function and drive structural innovation in ways not yet imagined. The Casper Network will be a major player in this future infrastructure due to functions native to the Casper technology which are not available on other blockchains.
Research and Development - The Association is tackling challenges that blockchains face and ensures that the Casper Blockchain is ready for the future. Ensuring decentralization, readiness for quantum computing, and overall incentive structures are critical for the future.
Q4: Mrinal, you mentioned the Casper Blockchain was built and is optimized for developer adoption. Can you elaborate on what makes the Casper Network more developer-friendly and enterprise-grade than others?
Mrinal: Yes of course. Well, for one, many blockchains require proprietary programming languages knowledge to build on them. For example Ethereum uses Solidity while Cardano requires knowledge of Plutus. Casper supports Rust and Assembly where most programmers with experience in existing programming languages will be able to build on Casper.
To Elaborate on more features that make Casper the choice for real business…
Contract ution based on WASM lets developers use any language of their preference, rather than having to learn a new language to get started. Casper provides smart contract libraries for Rust and Assembly
Before blockchain, all software was built in an IDE (Integrated Development Environment - like Visual Studio). Casper contracts can be authored, compiled, run and tested from within this environment. No need for HardHat or Truffle.
Developers can use the tooling of their choice to build and test their contracts.
Permissioned references - it’s possible to share data securely across contracts.
Event emission - blockchain event data & transaction information is streamed from the node in a push mechanism rather than a pull mechanism. s need to listen and parse and match for relevant information - this is simpler than constantly querying the blockchain ‘Is my transaction done yet?’ - Think push notifications instead of polling for answers from the .
Casper is the only blockchain with on-chain package management. When a contract is created on a chain - it is ‘installed’ - at which point a new package is created. This is the exact same pattern as publishing a library to npm for example. New versions of a contract are automatically versioned. Contract upgrades are secure, and do not use proxy contracts or complicated design patterns. It is also possible for contracts that call other contracts to ‘peg’ to a specific version of the contract.
This is the way dependencies are managed today in software. Casper enables this same paradigm on the blockchain. Contract authors can also make specific versions inactive (deprecated), or even immutable (not upgradeable).
Powerful accounts with weighted keys - Delegate accounts to one another, grant weights for deployments, key management. This enables distributed control and management over contracts and accounts. Complex organizational hierarchies and governance models can be expressed in Casper accounts, and observed on chain. Accounts can support code ution and storage as well. Imagine being able to store a reference to all the tokens you own within your account, or a reference to all of the DeFi contracts you have interacted with? Right now on other blockchains, this is not possible. While these assets still exist in the context of their associated smart contracts, in Casper, your accounts can hold a handle, a reference to these contracts for easy access in the future.
There are a bunch of more features coming in the Casper 2.0 upgrade which we will communicate; stay tuned!
Q5: As we understand that CasperLabs is focused primarily around Enterprise Adoption, what about other aspects such as DeFi and NFT’s?
Mrinal: We definitely understand the importance of both of these growing segments within the blockchain eco. NFT’s have broad applications - I see the world as being full of non-fungible items. You cannot break up a chair into 100 pieces and use those pieces to purchase food - for example. It’s non-fungible. NFT’s are excellent for representing the world around us - on the blockchain.
We see NFT’s as having very high utility in Enterprise to track unique items, for tickets, coupons, KYC, and so on. This is why there is so much focus on NFT based contracts. Casper’s CEP-78 contract uses a factory pattern; it can be used to install many different types of NFT contracts. Casper NFT’s offer optional mutability of on-chain metadata, enabling the NFT’s to track changes to the state of its associated asset. Casper contracts function like ordinary software, it’s up to the contract author to determine what the upgrade pattern is. Because the VM on Casper is purpose built, it is possible to consider bringing the NFT standard host side, making the transactions faster, lighter and more gas efficient.
There are multiple marketplaces already integrating with the Casper Network; Metacask.io, Dmusic and DGallery, Wise.Art, Friendy.Market, CasperNFT.market and even one of our enterprise clients, IPwe, utilizes our NFT Technology.
We have some amazing NFT opportunities in the pipeline related to household brands that will be announced as they are built, stay tuned!
I’ll let Ralf discuss some of the DeFi implementations that are being built on the network as well.
Ralf: Thanks Mrinal. At the association, we see NFTs much broader than what they are used today.
We recognize that DeFi is important to bring liquidity and utility to the network. DotOracle has launched the first bridge on Casper - an AnySwap fork that connects Casper to BSC, Polygon, ETH, AVAX, FTM and other EVM compatible chains. You can find the bridge at https://bridge.dotoracle.network.
The Ferrum Network team is also launching white labeled bridges for BSC, ETH and Polygon- and these will be released shortly.
The first DEX is live at https://friendly.market - and 3 other DEX’s are preparing for launch (CasperSwap, WiseSwap, Swappery) in the coming months.
There are wrapped stablecoins and wrapped assets available in Friendly Market already.
There will also be wrapped stablecoin integration via the DotOracle bridge, Change.Now and eventually a native Frax implementation being developed on Casper.
It’s possible to observe all the contracts on mainnet at https://cspr.live/contracts - 151 contracts on mainnet, and 4,800 contracts on testnet. A lot of building is taking place, with production releases around the corner.
Here is a snapshot of the DeFi projects and infrastructure being built.
For an easy user experience, the Casper Network is supported by Torus Wallet (accessible at https://casper.tor.us/), which enables users to interact with Casper without having to worry about key management. Uphold (accessible at @https://uphold.com/) is also a popular onramp and venue to access Casper CSPR.
At the Casper Association we are very excited about NFTs, but not just in the form of pictures, but ALL kinds of files, data, creator product, invention, etc. In the coming weeks, you will see innovations around NFTs on Casper, immediately accessible to the community. NFTs are discoverable at cspr.live, (and the future Casper Wallet), an easy to use minting function will be available, with decentralized storage accessible for any user. Coming soon, the Association will bring highly secure minting options to the Casper Network.
