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CASPER BLOCKCHAIN
BIG IDEA
SHORT INTRODUCTION
Casper is an open-source Proof-of-Stake blockchain network built off the CBC (Correct-by-Construction) Casper specification originally established by early Ethereum developers. The Casper Network is optimized for enterprise and developer adoption by focusing on unique features like upgradeable contracts, predictable network fees, privacy flexibility, on-chain governance, and developer-friendly languages. Casper solves the scalability trilemma by allowing development teams to build with confidence that the network will optimize for security, decentralization, and high throughput.
GROWTH NARRATIVE
Many people tend to compare the Casper network with Ethereum 2.0. However, Casper's real counterpart is Ethereum 3.0, which plans to include pure CBC-Casper and WebAssembly, two core features of the Casper network. Ethereum 2.0 does not implement full CBC-Casper; it only includes Casper-FFG, which blends the liveness properties of Proof of Work2 (PoW) with the safety properties of CBC-Casper, and it might take 3-5 years to accomplish a full Ethereum 2.0 (after phase 0,1, and 2). With the most advanced concept and technology, and without the historical burden Ethereum has, the Casper network can jump out of the circle and build a new future-proof architecture of high performance, security, and scalability.
According to Deloitte's 2018 Global Blockchain Survey, 29% of businesses polled stated that they've already joined a blockchain consortium, 45% stated they are likely to join one within the next year, and 13% say they're interested in starting a consortium of their own. In many cases, consortium members are fierce competitors. Bank of America, Citi, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, and other multinational banking institutions are members of the R3 consortium. Enterprise blockchain technology helps to achieve coherent, effective, and secure ways of doing business. Modern business is a world of siloed repositories for data. Each organization keeps a separate copy of its data due to a lack of collective trust. Not only does this place companies at a data security risk, but its duplication is also severely wasteful.
The big advantage of Casper is how the blockchain has been engineered. Every part of Casper is a pluggable piece, thus effectively rendering it' future proof'. This is an extremely important aspect as we have seen how quickly technology can evolve within the crypto space and how difficult it is for legacy blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum to react and evolve with these changes, especially for companies' needs.
As seen above, the big advantage of Casper is how the blockchain has been engineered. Every part of Casper is a pluggable piece. We will determine to what extent it is 'Future Proof.'
INNOVATION
WebAssembly (WASM): The Casper Network supports developers building with WebAssembly. WebAssembly is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications. In other words, the Casper network provides an open coding standard to support Rust, Assembly, Script, and all the languages that could be compiled to WebAssembly, consequently having a much larger audience. This provides an easier path for developers and businesses to immediately start building with the Casper protocol. It's estimated that 26 million developers (including 7M open source developers) exist globally, while only 20 000 developers among them are familiar with Solidity.
Casper Correct-By-Construction Protocol (CBC): Initially created for the PoS Ethereum, the fundamental design philosophy behind correct-by-construction protocols is first to build a very abstract but robust framework and provide proofs of fundamentally important properties that the framework guarantees. Then, we incrementally define the framework further and inherit all past proofs and guarantees. Using this iterative approach of define-prove-inherit, we build families of protocols that satisfy the same proofs and provide the same guarantees at a high level yet can be defined to be specialized enough for practical use. It is called correct-by-construction because the correctness of new protocols is guaranteed by their construction, which is by incrementally defining an abstract (and provably correct) protocol further. The Casper network will use an Enhancement Proposal process (CEP) to share, discuss, and reach a consensus on network improvements and code changes. This process is equivalent to the BIP system in Bitcoin or EIP system in Ethereum. Anyone can submit a proposal and take part in the discussions. Validators and core developers will help guide the process. Network validators will ultimately decide whether to accept a software release or code change delivered through the CEP process, which is similar to miners in the Bitcoin or Ethereum networks. DApp developers can also select a supported protocol version for on-chain contracts as part of the contract code itself.
Casper Sharding: Sharding is a means to multithread and thus improves throughput and efficiency. Caspers' virtual machine memory's space is divided up into shards. Transactions include a list of all the shards whose memory they might need to access. A transaction that fails to list all shards it tries to access will fail. Each block is given a limited amount of sequential compute time (perhaps a constant or perhaps proportional to the number of tics that have passed since the parent block) and perhaps also given a bounded amount of total compute. Their sharding requires that the total length of the intervals not exceed some total computation bound or the number of windows overlapping at the same time not exceed some bound. This ensures that the transactions within a block are reasonably parallelizable, as the computation schedule essentially provides a mechanism for parallelizing the computation. This mechanism should produce the same results as if the computations were atomic, with each operation being performed at some arbitrary time during its interval. Because each block supports parallel execution, it should not affect security.
Caper Highway Protocol: Historically, most of the research in the field of consensus protocols has worked under the semi-formal assumption that the existence of more than n/3 dishonest nodes removes the existence of any provable safety guarantee. This is due to a paper written by Dwork, Lynch, and Stockmeyer, which proved that a partially synchronous protocol couldn't guarantee both liveness and finality if n < 3f + 1, where f is the number of nodes exhibiting Byzantine faults. Casper's team found a natural tradeoff between finality and liveness: the stronger finality guarantee we require, the more nodes or validators we need to honestly collaborate to finalize the block with such a guarantee. Requiring all validators to agree on a common finality threshold would solve this but introduce yet another parameter requiring consensus. Instead, Highway does not mandate a common threshold to be agreed upon. Each validator can use a different threshold. An important implication here is that validators can play different roles in the network. For example, some validators may deal mainly with finalizing small transactions where small latency is more important than high security, while others can prioritize safety over latency. As a result, we have a new consensus protocol that is both safe and lives in the classical partially synchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant model while at the same time offering several practical improvements over the existing Casper CBC protocol:
Strong Optimistic Finality: Highway enables the network to reach higher thresholds of finality based on real-life assumptions about the reliability of validators.
Flexibility: validators can choose different finality thresholds, allowing them to optimize for different roles in the ecosystem. The result is an advanced state-of-the-art Proof of Stake blockchain architecture that boasts impressive scalability and performance that will help to drive forward broader blockchain adoption.
As this is also pluggable, if an improvement is developed, the improved protocol can be plugged in seamlessly. Automatic, synchronized upgrades (as is present with CSPR) are important as it allows hard forks to be implemented as upgrades automatically and seamlessly. This is why Casper is deemed future-proof. Hard forks⁴ to continue to innovate and stay ahead of other chains. A choice won't be required between old CSPR or new CSPR. We simply remain on the same chain and continue to get things done.
DISRUPTIVENESS
To tackle the problem of high transaction fees, Casper is introducing a "gas futures market" concept. By tokenizing block space to allow companies to buy future block space, Casper's gas model aims to allow its blockchain users to lock in prices now to have more predictable future network usage costs. Regarding a potential network outage, it should be noted that each deployment has a TTL 'Time to live' setting. This is defaulted to 30mins but can be adjusted up to 1 day and from deploy creation time. This means that as deploys come in, they fit into blocks if there is a capacity (2500 per block currently). If there isn't sufficient capacity due to increased load, the deployment remains in a pending state for the period defined in the TTL until it then expires. This means that the network can never get into an overloaded state which causes the blockchain to crease functioning. Also, unlike other chains, there is no additional delay once a block is proposed for it to be finalized – this is because the consensus mechanism finalizes the blocks at 70% of block time.
Thanks to the CBC combined with the highway protocol analyzed above, Casper enables on-chain smart contracts to be directly upgraded, removing the need for complex migration processes and making it easier to patch smart contract vulnerabilities.
COMPETITION
First, and as explained before, many people tend to compare the Casper network with Ethereum 2.0. However, Casper's real counterpart is Ethereum 3.0.
There are two separate consensus algorithms defined as being Casper protocols :
FFG – Friendly Finality Gadget CBC.
Correct By Construct aka 'Casper the friendly GHOST.
Currently, Ethereum is a Proof-Of-Work (POW) blockchain. This means the same drawbacks constrain it as all POW blockchains, namely efficiency, and security. Because of this, the Ethereum council has opted to shift ETH from a POW blockchain to a POS in a staged fashion via 2 major upgrades – ETH2.0 and ETH3.0. The move to ETH2.0 will first implement the FFG protocol (which is a hybrid POW/POS blockchain) with the 3.0 release moving ETH to a fully POS blockchain implementation, CBC. The reason for this staged upgrade is that Ether can be considered in a similar way to a huge supertanker with considerable mass and slow momentum but requiring a lot of effort and power to change course. Endless projects and an incredibly high market cap, meaning that any major changes to Ethereum take considerable time. As mentioned, the first implementation (FFG, ETH2.0) will result in a hybrid blockchain where the blockchain will grow each block with the familiar ethash POW algorithm. However, every 50 blocks the chain finality is assessed via a network of validators. The reason why FFG cannot be POS consensus is that a consensus protocol provides 2 guarantees: Safety Liveness. ETH 2.0 will still be using POW for its liveness, with the safety of Casper, hence the hybrid model – to implement liveness on POS you are required to have leaders, eras, leader selection, etc.
The Casper Network could also be compared to all the other layer 1 Blockchain. However, some of them are particularly interesting:
HEDERA HASHGRAPH:
Hadera Hashgraph launched in 2018 with a unique hashgraph consensus mechanism that is unlike standard blockchain technology. The project has been marketed as 'enterprise grade' with a governing council of many well-known, large, and respected industry giants across a large variety of sectors. Hedera is heavily advertised as being the "enterprise-grade blockchain." Enterprise-grade is described as where products can integrate into infrastructure with minimal complexity and offer transparent proxy support. It means that a private blockchain provides a means to control the logic and sharing of information within a set of known authorized parties. Outside of Casper, existing private blockchain frameworks, such as Corda, Hyperledger Fabric, and Quorum, can connect to Hedera to achieve decentralized trust without exposing its content. The main differences are:
Predictable Fees: Hedera's fee schedule is set by the Hedera Governing Council and always based on USD — making it easy to estimate and control future costs. Casper is introducing a 'Gas Futures Market' where the fee can be locked in, thus providing enterprises with the degree of certainty they desire.
Enterprise Adoption: The Hedera network offers a public blockchain to which existing private blockchains can send transaction hashes in order to increase audibility. The Casper enterprise adoption strategy is one of the strongest in the market. The team has not boxed itself into a niche business but instead has a wide-ranging enterprise strategy targeting all potential markets. This is in addition to the public side chain. Casper will offer the public blockchain and the architecture for private enterprise blockchains.
Future-Proof: The design and engineering of Casper ensure it is a fully future-proof blockchain. It has achieved this by ensuring all components (Execution Engine, Network Engine, Consensus Layer) are pluggable. This allowed the blockchain to be upgraded with relative ease. The Hedera design is such that it aims to scale with increased network bandwidth capabilities in the future.
Hedera is indeed a very exciting and innovative proposal for consensus. However, the degree to which it is reliant on storing, sharing, and saving the full transaction flow history makes it an extremely heavyweight system. We have already experienced issues with other Layers 1 blockchain that has similar memory requirements. Namely, Solana, which experienced an outage for a week afterload, pushed the network to over 750GB, thus bringing down the entire network and effectively having to restart the genesis block. What I fear with these types of strategies where there is a mindless race for TPS is that there has been little thought to curtailing transactions in periods of extreme demand. Because HBAR is insistent on saving the message flow, it loses the ability to time out or queues any messages in cases of excess load. This is something that the Casper team has considered and implemented via a simple time-out strategy during periods of excess load.
CARDANO:
Cardano was launched in 2017 and spearheaded by Ether co-founder Charles Hoskinson. The platform began development in 2015 after a dispute between Hoskinson and Vitalik Buterin regarding the acceptance of venture capital funds. Hoskinson favored accepting funds to create a for-profit profit entity, whereas Buterin favored the non-profit approach. The token pre-sale occurred in Asia from September 2015 to January 2017, raising $62 million. A total of 26 billion tokens were sold at US $0.0024 each. Public trading of the tokens began on October 1st, 2017. The three entities supporting Cardano's development received 5.2 billion ADA following Cardano's genesis block mining.
The main differences are:
Decentralization: Cardano has recently moved from a federated blockchain, where there were only 3 block producers, to allow the community to produce blocks, thus encouraging decentralization. The Casper maintain launch was only 6 months before the time of writing this article; however, all 100 community validator slots have been taken and are exhibiting good levels of decentralization at this early stage.
Throughput: Cardano operates at about 7 transactions per second. This, however, is parameterized and may be adjusted up to approximately 50tps. This compares with CSPR, which achieves 2.5k transactions per block (100 WASM deploys per block). Both proto- cols have promised increased TPS via a layer 2 solution.
Security: CSPR is a powerful non-statistical method to guarantee security and finality given a threshold of malicious nodes. For ADA security, participants are prevented from exerting too much control over the network via a pool saturation point that exhibits diminishing re- turns when exceeded.
Slashing: Both CSPR and Cardano do not impose any fine for malicious nodes. CSPR implements jail time.
Enterprise adoption: Although the initial Ouroboros paper by Aggelos Kiayias proposed both a public and private blockchain, the Cardano team has chosen to focus solely on the public side chain. The Casper enterprise adoption strategy is one of the strongest in the market at present, where the team has not boxed themselves into a niche business but instead has a wide-ranging enterprise strategy targeting all potential markets. This is in addition to the public side chain. The focus from Cardano on the public chain was previously very specific about financial transactions. However, recently there has been a push into adoption within Africa.
Future Proof: The design and engineering of CSPR ensure it is a fully future-proof blockchain. It has achieved this by ensuring all components (Execution Engine, Network Engine, Consensus Layer) are pluggable. This allowed the blockchain to be upgraded with relative ease. Cardano has implemented segregation between the CSL and CCL layers to enable soft forks of the consensus protocol. However, it is limited to large changes to the protocol.
The differences between the two security protocols are less distinct than when comparing some other Layer 1 chains against Casper. Cardano has moved through a phase of BFT PoS and is now open for decentralization via the launch of the Shelly era. Both projects are also offering a promising Layer 2 increase in throughput. This is, however, where the similarities stop. Focusing on the adoption side, Cardano's aspirations within the African region have been heavily publicized for a long time; however, the only partnerships we can see to date are linked with entities such as schools within the region. There is yet to be an announcement on a multinational level. This is in comparison with Casper, where within its short existence, we have seen exciting news with companies such as iPwe. Refer to sovereign nations such as those publicized with the UAE. We believe this highlights the proactive approach CasperLabs is taking to begin quickly delivering utility from the Casper blockchain.
EDGE ON THE MARKET
As analyzed above, Casper is optimized for enterprises and developers through three main features: upgradeable contracts, developer-friendly languages, and forthcoming predictable network fees. All these implementations are giving Casper a concrete edge on the market.
Upgradeable Contracts. Casper enables on-chain smart contracts to be directly upgraded, removing the need for complex migration processes and making it easier to patch smart contract vulnerabilities.
Developer-Friendly Languages. Casper supports developers' building with WebAssembly. The network's development ecosystem is designed to be familiar to existing Web2 developers instead of being written in a proprietary language like Solidity. This provides an easier path for developers and businesses to start building with Casper immediately.
Predictable Network Fees (In Development). Casper intends to incentivize active and diverse network behavior by establishing consistent, predictable, and transparent gas costs - eliminating volatility and improving both developer and user experience.
Casper is a full Layer 1 blockchain, unlike some competitors mentioned above. This means that it will serve as its own public and permissioned blockchain. This is unlike enterprise ETH blockchains which are effectively clones and modifications of the ETH codebase. Casper has the option to switch from Permissioned to Public, unlike Libra, R3, and Hyperledger.
The successful productization of the CBC protocol is, in fact, the aspirational goal for ETH in their ETH3.0 release discussed above. The release of ETH3.0 is many years away, with the Ethereum foundation only now releasing phase 1 (of 3 phases) of ETH2.0. This superior feature of CSPR will drive adoption from dApp developers due to the significant security benefits of the protocol. In addition, future projects looking to develop on ETH can use CSPR in its current form to launch production-ready applications. We can use this to begin thinking about how to proxy the validation of CSPR. We can consider the demand for CSPR adoption to be driven by three sources:
Natural demand from projects looking to build on the CBC security protocol.
Demand from ETH projects looking for a head-start in their ETH3.0 implementation.
Demand resulting from enterprise adoption of CSPR.
For the demand, we can use the direct comparison of Polkadot (DOT) and Kusama (KSM). KSM is the testnet for DOT and where development is tested before being pushed to DOT. Currently, the KSM market cap is trading at 11.6% of DOT. Applying this proxy to CSPR against ETH at current ETH levels leads to a potential market cap of $24bn for CSPR. Although there is no guarantee of a similar market cap ratio driven, we can argue that it is the best proxy we have at present for this dynamic. We should also consider that there will be significant demand from [1] and [3] as CSPR is an independent blockchain from ETH. This is unlike the DOT and KSM example, as KSM is not independent of DOT and arguably has no future if DOT fails. Finally, we should state there is no guarantee that ETH3.0 will ever be released. If this does not occur, we will likely see even greater demand for CSPR from a point.
CasperPad. CasperPad is the first Casper-supported, fully decentralized launchpad. It's built to launch innovative and industry disruptive projects on the Casper Network. CasperPad opens a unique gateway to invest in future projects launched onto the Casper Network. The design and engineering of the Casper Blockchain ensure a fully future-proof blockchain, specifically when it comes to continual development according to the evolving needs of its users. This massively boosts the current Casper ecosystem to build decentralized exchanges, marketplaces, and DeFi solutions. Casper is designed for real-world applications without sacrificing usability, cost, decentralization, or security. This will increase the value of the pad, prepping it for enterprises.
REAL-WORLD APPLICATION
Many enterprises globally have hesitations about the open programming standards of public blockchains and had previously chosen to use private blockchain platforms such as Hyperledger or Corda from R3. CasperLabs has created a public system that gives them the benefits of a private chain. Mrinal (CEO) states, "We have given enterprises the trust of a public chain, but the security and privacy of the private chain and enterprises can still run part of its infrastructure on a private chain if desired. For example, a company managing licensing rights for songs would want to keep most of their play data private (due to local regulations), yet at the same time hash the play data to a public ledger so they can have an audit trail on the ledger in case they ever need to prove they didn't alter or make up this data, without actually surfacing the data." CasperLabs also makes blockchain development accessible to the world's 38 million developers by using familiar programming languages and developing friendly processes without sacrificing performance and security.
CONCERNS
The preliminary analysis of the project allowed us to identify the different axes of innovation that Casper exploited in its creative process. However, some grey areas need to be highlighted. As mentioned in most official documents, some of their innovations are still in the development stage, and the anticipation of transaction fees is one of them. In practice, this system may encounter difficulties, especially during periods of high network congestion. They are offering the final Ethereum solution years before it, making Casper an ideal candidate for all dApps developers and companies curious about the future benefits of this new Ethereum. However, after 1 year of existence, the project is not yet as successful as expected. In the analysis of the community and their marketing strategy, we will see that Casper can attract the general public very attached to Ethereum.
TEAM
OVERVIEW
MRINAL MANOHAR
Chief Executive Officer
Technology and finance leader previously with Microsoft, Bain, and Bain Capital. Ran the TMT sector of a $1B+ hedge fund. MS in CS with distinction from Carnegie Mellon University.
MEDHA PARLIKAR
Chief Technology Office
Product and engineering leader with decades of experience delivering production software at marquee companies such as Adobe, Omniture, Avalara, MP3.com, and DivX.
CLIFF SARKIN
Chief Operating Officer
Entrepreneur and former VP of Biz Dev at DNA, a leading early-stage crypto fund. Led VideoSurf's $80M sale to Microsoft. B.A., UC Berkeley '01. J.D., Harvard Law School '05.
DR. DANIEL KANE
Consensus Protocol Advisor
Dr. Kane has earned two Bachelor's Degrees from MIT and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is advising Casper on blockchain cryptography and security.
ANDREAS FACKLER
Consensus Researcher
Fackler is an experienced Rust developer and has previously led teams at Google, MaidSafe, and Xored's RCPTT. He has his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Ludwig-Maximilians Universität.
DANIEL MARFURT
Chief Finance Officer
Daniel is a tech-oriented finance and management expert. Previously he led finance at Status. IM is a crypto company with a $100M+ market cap. He holds a double MA in Economics and International Management.
TRACK RECORDS
Mrinal Manohar: Mrinal Manohar is the CEO and co-founder of CasperLabs. He has a career as both a computer programmer and a finance professional. Before founding Casper, Mrinal was a principal and the technology, media, and telecom sector head at a roughly $1 billion long-only hedge fund (Sagard Capital), a private equity associate at Bain Capital in Boston, and an associate consultant at Bain & Company. Mrinal has been investing in the blockchain industry since 2012 as a seed investor in Ethereum, Blockstack, Basis, Maker, Filecoin, and more.
Medha Parlikar: Medha Parlikar, CTO of CasperLabs, started working with technology in the early '80s. For the past 2 decades, she has delivered production software at Adobe, Omniture, Avalara, MP3.com, and DivX. She strives to deliver high-quality production software while inspiring technical teams to solve tough problems and do their best work. She fell down the blockchain rabbit hole in 2017 and has been an avid fan of the promise of decentralization and open-source software. This led her to co-found CasperLabs in 2018.
Cliff Sarkin: Cliff is a strategic advisor to technology leaders of major blockchain and cryptocurrency projects. An attorney and seasoned executive, he has deep expertise in emerging technologies, corporate law, transactions, M&A, private equity, and venture capital. Cliff is currently COO of CasperLabs, a startup building an open-source blockchain platform aimed to achieve scale without sacrificing decentralization. Prior to his work with distributed ledger technologies, Cliff served as legal counsel and business operations executive for three Internet startups in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. Among several notable accomplishments, Cliff led Video- Surf's $80M cash acquisition by Microsoft in 2011. Cliff received his JD from Harvard Law School and his BA in Political Science from UC Berkeley.
Daniel Kane: Daniel Kane has diverse research interests in mathematics and theoretical computer science, particularly in the areas of combinatorics, number theory, derandomization, and Boolean functions. He has published papers on topics such as algorithms for big data, results on writing numbers as sums of primes, and the structure of polynomials in many variables. Daniel has won the best paper or best student paper awards in the Conference on Computational Complexity, Foundations of Computer Science, and the Symposium on Principles of Database Systems. He also has experience as an instructor at Stanford University and Harvard University and has helped train students for various mathematics contests, including as an instructor in the United States Math Olympiad Summer Program. As an associate professor at UC San Diego, Daniel splits his teaching responsibilities between the departments of computer science and mathematics.
Andreas Fackler: After his doctoral studies in Mathematics, he joined Google in 2012. He left Google in 2015 and started working remotely as a freelancer on Xored's RCPTT, MaidSafe, POA, and other projects. He has 10 years of Rust language coding.
MANPOWER / PROJECT ADEQUATION
With a team of over 55 members, including the executive team, Casper has individuals who excel in their respective fields. 36 engineers work on the project on a permanent basis.
PARTNERS & BACKERS
Vertalo: Vertalo is an investor onboarding, cap table, and compliance platform that connects issuers and investors directly to sources of secondary liquidity. Working directly with issuers or through our growing network of broker-dealers, Vertalo enables any asset to be tokenized, stored in a blockchain wallet, and traded in real-time based on the smart contract between the issuer and the investor. Vertalo has raised a total of $7.8M in funding over 5 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on May 13, 2021, from a Series A round. Vertalo is funded by 21 investors. Naples Technology Ventures and Quansight Initiate are the most recent investors.
Messari: Messari provides market intelligence that drives high-conviction participation in the crypto economy. They help professionals, builders, and communities navigate web3 by providing world-class tools and intelligence. Founded in 2018, Messari is the leading provider of crypto market intelligence products that help professionals navigate crypto/Web3 with confidence. We bring transparency and smarter qualitative and quantitative analytics to the industry by combining a global research database with a comprehensive suite of data visualization and asset discovery tools. We help drive smarter participation in crypto from individuals and institutions alike.
Draper Golen Holm: Draper Goren Holm is a blockchain venture studio and fund created by Tim Draper, Alon Goren, and Josef Holm, focusing on incubating and accelerating the best early-stage startups from around the world. Josef and Alon are the same teams that have built some of the top blockchain conferences, such as the LA Blockchain Summit (FKA Crypto Invest Summit), Global DeFi Summit, Security Token Summit, and other events. In 2019 they partnered with billionaire investor Tim Draper to build the next generation blockchain venture studio and fund with a global focus.
Rocktree Capital: RockTree Capital is a pioneer in international merchant banking with expertise in cross-border transactions, mergers and acquisitions, blockchain and technology, energy, investment, and real estate between China, North America, the Middle East, and Central. Our team converges its core strengths of acquisitions, finance, legal and due diligence with our global partners.
Arrington XRP Capital: Arrington XRP Capital is a digital asset management firm launched by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. The $100 million funds chose Ripple (XRP) as its base de- nomination.
CONNECTIONS WITHIN THE CRYPTO SPACE
Casper has partnered with enterprises and Web3 development teams across industries to build performant, scalable, and secure blockchain-based solutions. For example:
IPwe: IPwe has built the world's first global patent market, connecting the world's patent ecosystem on a single platform. The IPwe platform enables traditional patent transactions (licenses, sales, and acquisitions) and empowers new classes of transactions like reporting, financing, and insurance. IPwe leverages artificial intelligence, data mining, predictive analytics, and now blockchain technology to create entirely new ways of interacting and transacting with patents and improving understanding of this asset class. CasperLabs and IPwe have partnered to build a chain of custody (CoC) solution for public patent records. The "CoC Solution" will use the Casper public blockchain to store, secure, and trace patent data. The result is a paradigm shift in the application and role of patents in finance, technology, and enterprise. Intellectual Property (IP) is the largest and often most critical asset on corporate balance sheets. CTOs and CFOs today are taking a greater interest in how IP is tracked, managed, and deployed. A first step in the evolution of an improved understanding and management of this critical asset is a reliable CoC solution.
Metis: Casper and Metis have partnered to support Metis' layer 2 DAO and accelerate the creation of DAOs and decentralized economies. Previously built on Ethereum, Metis found themselves hindered by gas costs and network latency; thus, choosing to build on Casper to leverage its developer friendliness, upgradeable contracts, and other core features. Metis is a layer 2 open framework for the creation, management, and scale of DACs (Decentralized Autonomous Companies). Metis draws a nuanced distinction between DAOs and DACs, describing the latter as "a subclass" of DAOs. Whereas DAOs focus primarily on matters of governance, DACs are designed specifically to address day-to-day business operations and management. Metis is focused on building out sustainable, decentralized companies on top of performant Layer 1 blockchains through their DAC framework.
PlasmaPay: PlasmaPay is a global digital payment platform enabling seamless entry into decentralized finance. PlasmaPay provides industry-leading UX, crypto/fiat wallets, and fiat on/off ramp services. Plasma. Finance is PlasmaPay's DeFi dashboard which aggregates the most popular DeFi protocols from different blockchains and allows users to manage their DeFi portfolio in one simple interface. Casper and PlasmaPay are introducing a more accessible framework for cross-border transactions by introducing a fiat on/off ramp for CSPR tokens. This will support the growing DeFi ecosystem by unlocking faster, more secure transactions at scale, among other use cases.
HeraSoft: The HeraSoftTM ransomware-proof solution (RPSTM) helps organizations be more secure, function faster, and far less expensive than any traditional centralized enterprise cloud solution available today. HeraSoft's distributed solution eliminates single points of failure that make cloud-based software systems vulnerable to cyber-attacks. HeraSoft works as a standalone solution or can be layered on to enhance the existing software's security. By deploying HeraSoft, enterprises and government organizations can enhance both data cybersecurity and application cybersecurity across industries (i.e., import/export, banking, health, etc.). HeraSoft is migrating its gold-backed asset token, Anthem Gold, onto the Casper Network. This will launch the next phase of asset tracking and token protocol development on Casper. HeraSoft will also leverage the Casper Network to continue expanding its enterprise offering of secure, ransomware-proof technology solutions.
CONNECTIONS WITHIN THE TARGETED SECTOR
CasperLabs and the developer of the Casper Network announced a partnership with His High- ness Sheikh Juma bin Maktoum Al Maktoum's SJM Group of Companies to establish their local presence to facilitate the use of the Casper Network in the UAE. CasperLabs will work closely with local government agencies and UAE-based enterprises to conceptualize, develop and implement innovative use cases that leverage Casper's unique combination of enterprise-grade security, scalability, and decentralization. Since its Mainnet launch this spring, Casper has emerged as the only true enterprise-grade blockchain on the market, offering a compelling alternative to networks that have failed to garner adoption for enterprise use cases. Known globally for its spirit of innovation, the UAE is exploring building on Casper for various use cases such as financial services; proven authenticity and sourcing for the Dubai Gold and Commodities Exchange; creation of a national UAE identity solution; certificate, registry, and notary signing using a dApp like Casper-Sign; and university credential verification, to name a few.
In January, Casper announced a partnership with China's Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN). Through the agreement, which has been minted as a nonfungible token (NFT) as a sign of commemoration, Casper Network will be added as the blockchain of choice to the Fuzhou City Chain for use in public and private crypto infrastructure developments in the region — dubbed "Fuzhou Chain powered by Casper." RockTree Capital, an investment company, based in New York, played a critical role in bringing forward the agreement between Casper and the city of Fuzhou. As told by stakeholders, the partnership's main goal is to enable BSN to gain from Casper's scalability, security, and decentralization and the use of the open-permissioned blockchain (OPB) protocol to eliminate the need for using cryptocurrencies to pay for gas fees. Since its launch in 2019, BSN has expanded to more than 120 public city nodes across China, serving as data centers running and processing transactions on its umbrella blockchain networks.
COMMUNITY
COMMUNICATION
During the last month, Casper has been very active on Twitter, with a rate of about 1 tweet per day. The community is constantly updated on the team's progress behind CasperLabs, by making AMAs on Twitter, video conferences on YouTube, etc.
FEEDBACK FROM USERS
BitGo: Casper is introducing a new security standard for L1 blockchains. We've been impressed by its unwavering focus on building a highly secure architecture from day one.
Draper Goren Holm: Casper has built an essential blockchain platform for real-world applications without sacrificing the essential components of usability, cost, decentralization, or security. Cardinal Cryptography: Our joint work on the new generation of DLTs will result in insights into the core properties of consensus protocols, as well as the better overall performance of the DLT-based solutions.
Metis: With the most advanced concept and technology, and without the historical burden as Ethereum has, the Casper network can jump out of the circle and build a new future-proof architecture, which is of high performance, security, and scalability.
IPwe: We are confident that partnering with the expert talent at Casper and building on the Casper network provides us with the strongest and most sustainable solution to supercharge the evolution of the patent and intellectual property ecosystem.
Red Date Technologies: BSN is happy to be working with Casper to provide developers with the best protocol for building decentralized applications. We'd also like to invite Casper to join our open permissioned project in China.
SIZE AND ENGAGEMENT
The Casper community is very active on the networks on Twitter, despite its small size. On Discord and Telegram, Casper has, respectively, 35000 and 48000 members that are also really involved.
TECHNOLOGY
BLOCKCHAIN TYPE
Layer 1.
ARCHITECTURE
CBC Consensus.
Highway Protocol.
Casper nodes: Rust.
Smart contracts: Web Assembly.
STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT
Mainnet and Token launched.
AUDITS
Trail of Bits has Completed an Audit of the Casper Highway Protocol. The Trail of Bits audit was completed between November 16th and December 1st and encompassed an assessment of CasperLabs' Highway consensus protocol. The audit sought to answer critical questions, including:
Will misbehaving validators be punished?
Is the system prone to a resource exhaustion attack?
Are units appropriately validated before being appended to the state?
Can an attacker game the system such that they are selected as the next leader? Is LNC (Limited Naivety Criterion) validation appropriately implemented?
Is the buffer mechanism for LNC validators appropriate?
The Trail of Bits audit "did not produce high severity results and showed proper use of security hygiene."
PRICE
TOKEN RELEASE DATE
March 2021
PRODUCT RELEASE DATE
March 2021
MARKET CAPITALIZATION
06/01/2022 : $191,867,269
ATL
ICO CoinList : $0.015 - 03/21/2021
ATH
$1.36 - 04/12/2021
MARKET CAPITALIZATION GROWTH POTENTIAL
Today Casper's market capitalization is low, under $300m, and as stated, we expect the future state of POS blockchains to be dominated by ETH, but with CSPR also holding a substantial share of the market. Therefore the upside on CSPR is greater than that of Ethereum from this point. We feel CSPR will hold a substantial share of the future market can be explained as follows:
Potential future regulatory shocks: Casper is proactively addressing these early by considering AML and KYC solutions, which will aid enterprise adoption. Infrastructure projects such as ETH and CSPR have more real-world utility and are used to facilitate the development of applications on their respective blockchains and can be considered more as a technology solution than merely a speculative asset. The intrinsic value of these tokens will eventually become a function of the demand for processing transactions on the blockchains instead of being driven by the current speculative nature that is dominant within the crypto space.
The core technology of the protocol is covered in our CBC and Highway protocol explanations above. The fact that CSPR's successful implementation of Casper CBC positions itself to be an effective testnet for future ETH 3.0 development. Meaning that it will naturally pull development from Ethereum projects looking to get a head start on their ETH 3.0 dev and exhibit a similar behavior seen when currently analyzing KSM and DOT.
The fact that CSPR is a standalone blockchain, unlike KSM – where we can argue that if DOT fails, so will KSM. However, if ETH fails (or delays upgrades further), it will drive even stronger CSPR adoption.
Assuming this, we can now move to a medium-term ETH prediction. 'Global Macro Strategy,' a trusted research hub, which is a staple read for many of the world's high net worth families, has predicted a potential $20k ETH value in the medium term. This would take the ETH market cap to $2.3trillion. Now, if we assert that the future smart contract blockchains will likely be dominated by ETH, holding a 60% share (assumption), this will take the total market size to $3.8trillion. As we have argued, CSPR has the strong fundamentals in place to take a share of this future market. Let's make this a conservative 10% of the future market. This will result in a potential future market cap for CSPR of $388bn. Considering the total token count of 10bn, this would price CSPR at $38 per Token.
MARKETS
TOKENOMICS
DISTRIBUTION, VESTING PERIODS, CIRCULATING SUPPLY
$14M private validator token sale (Sep. 2020) - Round 1. Notable Private Token Sale.
Participants: HashKey Capital, RockTree Capital, Chain Capital, Consensus Capital, Cluster Capital, AU21 Capital, Blockchange Ventures, GSR, Stake.Fish, Sora Ventures, ZB Global, Gate.io, Wavemaker, Ropart Asset Management, Waterdrip Capital, AGE Fund, Woodstock Fund, Oasis Capital. * $0.01 per CSPR; 3-month required staking period from mainnet launch, followed by three-month unbonding period.
$11.9M private validator token sale (Jan. 2021) - Round 2 *$0.015 per CSPR; 3-month required staking period from mainnet launch, followed by a three-month unbonding period.
$33.5M token sale on Coinlist (March 2021) :
Option 1:
Starting Sale Date: March 23-28, 2021.
Number of Tokens: 800M.
CSPR Price per Token: $0.015 % of Genesis Block.
Supply: 8%.
Lockup: 12-month lockup.
Release: 6-month post-lockup release.Option 2:
Starting Sale Date: March 25-28, 2021.
Number of Tokens: 400M.
CSPR Price per Token: $0.02 % of Genesis Block.
Supply: 4%.
Lockup: 6-month lockup.
Release: 6-month post-lockup release.Option 3:
Starting Sale Date: March 26-28, 2021.
Number of Tokens: 400M.
CSPR Price per Token: $0.03 % of Genesis Block.
Supply: 4%.
Lockup: 40 days.
Release: Freely trading 40 days from March 18, 2021.Option 4:
Starting Sale Date: April 7, 2021.
Number of Tokens: 100M.
CSPR Price per Token: $0.015 % of Genesis Block.
Supply: 1%.
Lockup: 12-month lockup.
Release: 6-month post-lockup release.
DEFLATIONARY / INFLATIONARY MECHANISM
Supply: There will be 10 billion CSPR on the mainnet at the time of genesis. The annual inflation rate will be 8% (about 80 million CSPR). Token utility: The CSPR token will be used for transaction fees, staking, and delegation. Staking rewards: 80 million tokens will be automatically paid out as staking rewards to stakers and delegators for securing the network over time.
INCENTIVES TO HOLD
Staking.
A new ecosystem is being developed around Casper.
Launchpad.
Validators rewards.
TOKEN DEMAND VERSUS PRODUCT USE
The Token is used in many ways, as seen before; it is not a speculative token.
TOKEN REACTION REGARDING ITS ECOSYSTEM
Casper native token and its ecosystem are reacting the same way.
Not financial advice. The Crypto Intelligence Report is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Do your own research and make an informed decision.
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