Zug, 17 September 2024 - The Casper Association announces a step-change accelerating efforts to drive innovation and strengthen the Casper community. The aim is to empower the engineering team, enhance the technology, and foster greater engagement within the Casper ecosystem.
New leadership to drive innovation
The Association welcomes Michael Steuer as the new Chief Technology Officer. Michael is a co-founder of Casper Labs, the CTO of MAKE, and an accomplished CTO for over 25 years with a track record of delivering category-defining products across a number of industries. He will lead a dedicated team of developers, focusing on advancing Casper's core protocol development and technical capabilities and supporting Casper’s strong ecosystem of third-party developers, validators, and platforms. Under his guidance, the team will now assume responsibility for the core protocol roadmap and upgrades. They will prioritize features that create tangible demand and deliver innovations that make Casper an increasingly attractive platform for both traditional and cutting-edge crypto applications.
Accelerating development and retail-focus ecosystem growth
This acceleration towards innovation and mass-market use cases includes several areas:
Timely advancement
This shift aligns with the upcoming Condor (Casper 2.0.0) release, Casper’s most significant network upgrade to date. The engineering team is coordinating Condor's release with a focus on seamless integration for all ecosystem stakeholders, setting the stage for the post-2.0.0 roadmap, including multi-VM capabilities.
Creating an efficient platform, reducing positions
In view of the changes and the priorities, we also took measures to adapt the organizational structure. We implemented a cost structure which puts us in a position to allocate our resources to where they have the maximum impact. As a result we had to reduce jobs. We understand and regret the consequences these decisions have on each of our affected colleagues. We thank them for their commitment and their contributions to the Casper project.
Empowering the community, today
Central to this progression is a firm commitment to increased community involvement and transparency. With immediate effect, the Association is implementing new channels for engagement and collaboration, fostering a more decentralized and participatory ecosystem. These initiatives include a monthly Validator Call to discuss protocol development and network governance; a discussion forum in a truly interactive setup to capture and discuss ideas among active developers, set to launch on Discourse; and a bi-weekly DeFi working group to collaboratively execute on a DeFi roadmap. Additionally, multiple Telegram apps with a CSPR airdrop feature are being introduced to further engage the broader user community.
Together, these initiatives are a first step towards empowering validators, developers, and users to play a more active role in shaping Casper's future.
Looking ahead
While this announcement marks a significant step forward, there is much more to do. The Casper Association will work closely with the community to shape and refine its approach. The next iteration will be shared, in consultation with the community, later in Q4 2024.
An AMA will be held with Michael Steuer at 1600 CET (1400 UTC) on Wednesday 18 September in the Casper Main Telegram Channel.
The Casper Association is the not-for-profit, Switzerland-domiciled organization responsible for overseeing the network and supporting its organic evolution and continued decentralization. The membership in the Association is comprised of the independent validators which run nodes on the Casper Network.
