On March 31, 2021, the Casper Network mainnet went live with its genesis block. The launch came in conjunction with one of the largest-ever token sales in CoinList’s history, which witnessed more than 270,000 registrants, raising $33.5M for the Casper Association. The progress we have realized over the past 365 days has been nothing short of staggering.

To illustrate:

• Casper is already one of the largest PoS chains with 16,000 unique delegators; over 70,000 accounts (a figure that doesn’t even include the 35,000+ successful CoinList sale participants); 480,000+ contract deploys, 385,000+ native CSPR transfers, and 180 community validators competing for 100 slots to secure the network.
• Between CasperLabs and the Casper Association, there are now more than 80 full-time and fully dedicated employees – the vast majority of whom are engineers – devoted entirely to the Casper protocol.
• The DEVxDAO has already received nearly 400 grant proposals, activated more than 100 grants, and completed 39 grants totaling more than $16M across the Casper ecosystem.
• Professional organizations have already deployed or are planning to deploy production workloads on Casper, including IPwe, Metacask, and DMusic.
• Going global, CasperLabs also joined the BSN’s Open Permissioned Blockchain Initiative (OPB) with a modified version of Casper called the Fuzhou Chain, from which digital certificates will be bridged onto Casper, as permitted by the OPB administrators.
• Earlier this month, Casper teamed up with WiseArt, MAKE, and actress Brooke Shields to mint the first-ever non-fungible token (NFT) in outer space (this one has even bigger ramifications when you consider the growing convergence of NFTs and connected devices!).
  The Government of Dubai partnered with CasperLabs on a major blockchain initiative in the UAE.
• The CSPR token is now available on more than two dozen global exchanges and is natively supported by eight major wallets, including Ledger.
• Programmers are flocking to Casper, as evident in the 30,000+ members within its Discord channel.
• In its first year since launch, Casper has run two successful, global hackathons in partnership with Gitcoin — The Friendly Hackathon & Ready Player Casper — featuring more than 1,600 developers and producing several dozen dApps, which will be launching on the network soon.

To understand Casper, you need to appreciate the significance of upgradeable smart contracts – a key feature introduced by the Casper Blockchain.

Unlike other L1s, Casper’s protocol allows developers to update contracts even after they’ve been deployed to mainnet. This is a critical feature for any larger business deploying applications in any environment, Web3 or otherwise – and has the potential to be the basis for innovative financial systems. This unique component has also enabled Casper to quickly expand its footprint among Fortune 1000 companies, along with the governments of the UAE and China, among others.

Upgradeable contracts are even more compelling when you consider that building on Casper does not require developers to know highly specialized programming languages like Solidity, Michelson, or Plutus. If you’re one of the 25M+ developers worldwide who code in more mainstream languages like Rust, TypeScript, C++, Javascript, and others, you can be up and building dApps on Casper within a few weeks.

Proof-of-stake (PoS) networks continue to gain popularity as a less energy-intensive and more environmentally sound alternative to proof-of-work (PoW) models. As a PoS chain, Casper is building on this evolution by championing enhanced security standards, including private key management for public chains, along with a more secure validation model that requires consensus from a minimum of two-thirds of validators (as opposed to the many L1s that currently require as low as 20% to realize “consensus”).

If these features sound familiar, it’s because they’re the same features promised by Ethereum 3.0 – at a time when Ethereum is just now entering its 2.0 phase!

Casper is well-positioned to offer developers unique benefits to some of the most essential building blocks underpinning Web3 adoption. NFTs and DeFi applications have spurred multi-billion dollar industries into blockchain overnight. However, this rapid growth has exposed core challenges to much of the underlying infrastructure being built. Casper offers scaling solutions designed to increase energy efficiency and security while introducing smart contract standards that go well beyond what is possible today.

One of the ways in which we achieve this is via Casper’s innovative, future-proof, and environmentally friendly NFT smart contract standard. Combined with the aforementioned upgradeable smart contracts, NFTs built via Casper can be modified to incorporate additional benefits and utility to owners.

Moreover, our unique “Weighted Key Management” feature enables developers and designers to create much more user-friendly solutions to security and custody and extend access permissions across multilevel systems. This opens up vast possibilities for coordinating incentive mechanisms that have disruptive implications for blockchain gaming, NFTs, and smart financial instruments.

The above facts and figures are impressive in their own right, but even more so when you consider that, to date, Casper has not yet supported active DeFi markets.

With Casper’s pending 1.4.5 update, Casper will support DeFi products, including cross-protocol bridges, NFT marketplaces, decentralized exchanges, automated market makers, yield farming, and collateralized lending applications – all set to launch shortly after the update goes live in early April.

The potential here is limitless, especially given Casper’s more efficient gas model, which, on average, costs less than a cent — a drastic improvement over Ethereum’s prohibitively high fees.

Casper’s growth will be greatly influenced by — but certainly not limited to — DeFi. For a broader view of the ecosystem's evolution, check out the Casper Association’s recently published List of Top 2022 Priorities.

Moreover, by the end of 2022, the ecosystem will see the emergence of Casper 2.0, inviting an array of network improvements, including enhanced performance and faster block times, simpler and more powerful smart contracts, and streamlined code, which will improve engineering velocity and easier maintenance.

By 2025, enterprises are expected to generate more than $1.5 trillion in value from blockchain applications – a figure expected to double to $3 trillion by 2030 alone. Many of these businesses have firm requirements around security and the ability to customize deployments that other blockchains simply can’t support.

Which blockchain, then, is left standing in this equation?

Casper.

Here’s to another blockbuster year!