Earlier this week, the Casper Association announced that a new interim board would be taking over by December 1st, 2024. Shortly after the announcement, Michael Steuer and Matt Schaffnit from the new board, along with Ralf Kubli, hosted an AMA session on Casper’s main Telegram channel to align with the Casper community on governance changes, development plans, and future milestones.
Earlier this week, the Casper Association announced that a new interim board would be taking over by December 1st, 2024. Shortly after the announcement, Michael Steuer and Matt Schaffnit from the new board, along with Ralf Kubli, hosted an AMA session on Casper’s main Telegram channel to align with the Casper community on governance changes, development plans, and future milestones.
Q: When will the new interim board take over?
Ralf: The new interim board will replace the existing board no later than December 1st, 2024.
Q: Who are the members of the interim board?
Ralf: The interim board will comprise Matt Schaffnit, Michael Steuer, and Pascal Schmid.
Q: What happens to the operational setup?
Ralf: Operational structures, roles, and responsibilities will remain in place within Casper Association until further notice.
Q: How long will the interim board serve?
Ralf: The interim board will have an initial term of one year but has the ability to call for early elections.
Q: What is the General Assembly?
Matt: The General Assembly is the body of Casper Association members who have voting rights in future board elections and potentially other governance matters, as per the Swiss law regulating Swiss Associations.
Q: How will public feedback be incorporated into governance?
Michael: Public forums have been established where community stakeholders can provide feedback on proposals affecting the protocol and the network. You can participate via forum.casper.network.
Q: What are Working Groups and how will they function?
Michael: Working groups (e.g., for Validators, DeFi developers) will be established to meet regularly on a recurring basis to collaborate on relevant issues. These meetings will be recorded and published for the community, pending approval from participants. Written debriefs will be published every time for the community. We have our first DeFi Working Group scheduled for next week (invitations going out today), and we expect to host our first Validator Call with Core Developers the week after.
Q: What is the role of the Delegated Assembly Member (DAM)?
Michael: Going back to community governance of the project. The DAM will have special voting powers in the Casper Association Board specifically for on-chain proposals. For on-chain proposals only, they have outsized voting power and can determine the outcome of the board decision unilaterally, but are legally obligated to vote according to the majority vote held on-chain. This will guarantee the community's role in governance once implemented.
Q: How will on-chain voting work?
Michael: An on-chain mechanism will be implemented where Mainnet Validators can vote on relevant proposals on behalf of their delegators. There will be a publicly available list of types of proposals that have to be held on-chain, such as approving the annual budget, grants over a certain amount, etc. Each proposal will be open for a certain number of working days. During that period, validators can express their vote as early or as late as they want. Validator votes on each proposal will be clearly visible on CSPR.live or another designated destination. Delegators can engage with their validators to find out their voting intention and influence it if the validator decides to take their input. After validators have expressed their vote, delegators will still have a window of several days to redelegate their stake to another validator if they believe the current validator doesn’t best represent their interests. When the vote closes, the outcome is determined by the relative stake represented by each validator’s vote, and the DAM will be bound to represent that outcome in Board votes.
Q: Will delegators have any say in the voting process?
Matt: Yes, absolutely, delegators can engage with their validators to influence their voting intention. They will also have a window of several days after a validator has expressed their vote to redelegate their stake to another validator if they disagree with their validator’s vote.
Q: What types of proposals can the board vote on?
Michael: The board can vote on two types of proposals:
Q: What kinds of proposals must be voted on-chain?
Michael: The interim board will release a publicly available list of types of proposals that have to be held on-chain, such as approving the annual budget, grants over a certain amount, etc. And this list of types of proposals can grow over time.
Q: Will validators have equal voting power, or will it be proportional to their stake?
Matt: For on-chain proposals, validators will have voting power proportional to their stake. As such, delegators ultimately decide the weight of each validator’s vote.
Q: How does the on-chain voting mechanism relate to the General Assembly (GA) voting?
Michael: As per Swiss law, the GA of a Swiss Association can only vote on only specific items such as election/discharge of board members, approval of financial reports, election of auditors, etc. The on-chain voting mechanism will be completely independent from the GA and will relate to business and technology matters. The interim board will release a publicly available list of types of proposals that have to be held on-chain, after consultation with the community.
Q: What happens if the interim board achieves its objectives before the end of its initial one-year term?
Michael: The interim board may vote to call for early elections (earlier than its tenure of 12 months) and will be eligible for re-election in the GA.
Q: What is the Casper Association's role in this new governance structure?
Matt: The Casper Association will continue to serve as the legal and organizational structure for the Casper project, handling aspects such as vendor relations and regulatory requirements.
Q: Where can I find more information about these governance changes?
Michael: Community members can find more details, updates, or ask further questions here: forum.casper.network - we're very much looking forward to engaging!
Q: Is the relationship with CL somehow changed in the last 2 months?
Michael: I spoke with Mrinal Manohar two days ago, and he is fully supportive of this transition, congratulated us on our appointment, and as a co-founder and major stakeholder in the Casper project, he is extremely excited about Casper's direction under this new leadership.
Q: Is Casper turning into a DAO? Is this a correct understanding?
Michael: While Casper Association will remain a Swiss Association from a legal and regulatory perspective, and needs to be able to function "in real life" (e.g., have vendors, contractors, employees, file reports with regulatory institutions, etc.), the board will have a DAM, a member that is obligated to represent the will of the community on specific types of votes.
Q: Do you have an idea of when CSPR.name will be released?
Michael: We are done with the implementation on our end. The smart contracts are ready, CSPR.cloud supports CSPR.name, and so does CSPR.live now. We are awaiting updated timing from our partner D3, whom we're launching this with, and will advise the community when we have this. We are also excited that ICANN has started to kick off the registration process for the next batch of Top-Level-Domains and that we are lined up to get the registration of .CSPR is underway for use anywhere on the internet.
Q: Why would a developer choose to start a project on Casper instead of, let’s say, SUI, where they would have access to reputable native stablecoins, the better-known and more widely-used Move smart contract programming language, orders of magnitude better scalability, similar time-to-finality, and a $1 Billion TVL to build on?
Michael: Different blockchains serve different purposes and address different use cases. Let's start with your first assumption: Rust is massively more popular than Move—in fact, it often comes out as the most popular programming language on StackOverflow. Moreover, with a WASM-based VM, we can support many other programming languages. Additionally, we have very robust developer tooling for a non-EVM chain, which many others such as SUI lack. CSPR.cloud, for example, offers essentially the same functionality as Alchemy and Infura do for EVM chains. We know that our Stablecoin Ecosystem is not robust yet, and we are working to address that.
Q: What if the DAM is popular in the community and gets elected but actually does not have the leadership, governance, or understanding to perform the role?
Michael: There are going to be requirements, both determined by the interim board, as well as by Swiss regulations. This is an actual real board position in a regulated Swiss entity, and the prospective board member would have to sign a detailed agreement and have real legal obligations (and be comfortable with the risks of being a Swiss board member as well).
Q: Do you plan on expanding to communities outside the US? Will you have regional communities to teach what Casper is about? What major country is Casper focused on?
We have several official non-English speaking Casper groups. Here is a list of our regional communities:
Q: Can you tell us more about the burn mechanism being implemented on Casper 2.0?
Michael: To date, it hasn’t been possible to burn native CSPR, meaning there was no way to take an amount of CSPR, burn it, and have that action reduce the total supply. That is now possible in 2.0. Additionally, there are feature flags in the chain spec, which the validators may choose to activate in the future based on their delegators' wishes, that can enable features like burning transaction fees.
Q: Have you considered rebranding Casper with a new name? It’s often associated with the ghost and mattress brand, and I feel that it sometimes undermines its credibility.
Michael: Casper is named after the protocol, "CBC Casper". There are no current plans to rebrand.
Q: Is Ralf exiting the Casper Association entirely or just the board? What happens with the relationships he managed, like ACTUS and Nucleus Finance?
Ralf: Casper has done a lot for ACTUS, which is open source, just like Casper, and the concept of ACTUS has brought Casper good attention in the Financial and Capital Markets world. I will continue to promote Casper and ACTUS together, as it shows how open-source concepts work together to create new, powerful solutions for Finance, also in DeFi.
Q: What is Casper's goal?
Michael: Casper has multiple goals:
Q: Updates on Condor—how’s it going on Testnet? When will 2.0.0 be released?
Michael: We are wrapping up Release Candidate 5 (RC5). You can see the status of the remaining tickets here: GitHub - Casper Node RC5. The majority of tickets are either completing progress or are already in review. Once completed, we will move to Dev Net and test with our community partners. If there are no show-stoppers, Testnet would be next. It continues to be our intent to release Casper 2.0.0 before the end of the calendar year.
Q: The product roadmap on Casper build hasn’t been updated since Q1. Can we get it updated, please?
Michael: Our focus is on two streams:
For the node and protocol specifically, we are switching to so-called semantic versioning (major.minor.patch versions), versus named releases such as "Condor." After Casper 2.0.0, we will map our backlog to specific releases, so not only a roadmap but also a clearly delineated execution plan takes shape. The plan is to have this roadmap publicly available on either GitHub or casper.network.
Q: What is your long-term vision for community engagement on Casper?
Matt: Our long-term vision for community engagement on Casper is focused on deepening the community’s role in both development and governance. As Michael mentioned when he took on the role of CTO, we are committed to expanding the community’s involvement in meaningful ways.
To start, we’re launching a governance forum (forum.casper.network) where Validators and the public can engage in discussions around proposals and protocol changes. This will serve as a key space for collaborative decision-making and feedback.
Additionally, we’re organizing regular Validator meetings with the core engineering team, and for full transparency, recordings will be shared with the community. This ensures that everyone stays informed and involved in ongoing technical discussions.
We’re also excited to introduce a recurring DeFi workgroup, designed to align stakeholders on project priorities and foster collaboration. There’s already enthusiasm from developers I’ve spoken to, and we’re eager to see the community moving in the same direction.
The recent launch of CSPR.fans has also been a tremendous success, with over 200,000 users on Telegram. We’re thrilled by the level of engagement and participation this has generated so far.
As always, Michael will remain active in community forums, and I’m personally looking forward to becoming more involved as well. Together, we can ensure that Casper's future is shaped by the voices and contributions of its community.
Q: Is the Casper Association planning to explore partnerships and collaborations? Specifically regarding bug bounties?
Michael: We are happy to speak to any potential partners and are continuously engaging around new opportunities. We also have a dedicated section on the Casper Forum where community members can suggest new partnerships or discuss opportunities. You can find that here: Partnerships - Casper Forum. For bug reports, users can report these via GitHub or directly to a team member.
Q: If it’s a question of money, why doesn’t Casper Association raise money from retail to pay the listing fees on Binance and Coinbase?
Matt: Thanks for this. I want to clarify a few things. First, since the Association took over responsibility for exchange relationships last year, we have been listed on five top-tier exchanges, including Bitvavo and Bybit, which is now the #2 exchange globally by some measures.
I hope the community understands that it is absolutely in the Casper Association's interest to pursue such listings and that conversations with exchanges are ongoing. Progress in this area, however, can vary. That said, I remain hopeful that, with the right adjustments in approach and deeper community engagement, Casper Network will become an increasingly attractive candidate for listings on major exchanges.
Q: What ambition and concrete plans does the Casper Association have for a gaming ecosystem?
Michael: Given my background in the gaming industry (I have led gaming companies for over two decades, helped start the mobile gaming industry, and stood at the cradle for various gaming genres), obviously growing our gaming ecosystem is one of my ambitions.
With our renewed emphasis on community engagement and the growth we have been able to accomplish in the past two weeks with our gamified Fan app on Telegram (we added over 200,000 users in two weeks who are connecting Casper Wallets and are now being incentivized to perform on-chain tasks), we clearly see the value of gaming and gamification for the network. Expect to see more of this in the future.
Q: Do you see value in a clear and outspoken financing of a launchpad? This would give it a stamp of legitimacy.
Michael: There are several community-led launchpads in various stages of development. Casper Association engages with these community-led projects in various ways, which can include anything from developer support, marketing support, and in some cases, grants and/or incentives.
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