Welcome to the monthly recap of the Casper Twitter Space community call! In this month’s call, we had the opportunity to hear from the Casper Association team and speakers in the Casper ecosystem who shared exciting updates and insights on the latest developments. From updates on the Casper Wallet and the Casper Accelerate Grant Program, this call covered various topics relevant to the broader Casper community.
This recap is intended for those who missed or would like to revisit the call to provide them with the latest updates on Casper.
You can access the recordings of this space on our Twitter account.
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Casper Association Board Member Ralf Kubli was the first speaker. He shared exciting updates and briefly touched upon what is happening within the Casper ecosystem.
One major highlight was the recent launch of the Developer Portal, which serves as a well-organized and optimized learning platform for developers. The portal's motto, "30 minutes to deploy a smart contract on Casper," is backed by introductory context and useful tools to make the process as easy as possible. You can check out the Casper Developer Portal for more information.
Ralf also discussed the Casper Association's priorities, with a strong emphasis on developer acquisition. This involves dedicating people, money, and resources towards aggressive developer onboarding campaigns, including reward programs and grants. Furthermore, the association plans to attend key events and conferences to reach out to more developers throughout the year. One such event was the Paris Blockchain Week, where both the Casper Association and Casper Labs were present. Despite the bearish market situation, the event displayed a growing interest in blockchain development.
During the Paris Blockchain Week, Medha Parlikar from Casper Labs delivered a keynote speech, while Ralf Kubli joined a panel of industry experts to exchange ideas on the next steps in the blockchain industry, property rights, and digitization of assets. You can find the highlights of the event here.
Alizee Carli, the Director of Ecosystem, shared some exciting updates on new projects, initiatives, and the Accelerate Grant Program. Launched in late November 2022, the Accelerate Grant Program was created to encourage projects building on the Casper blockchain, making it easier for them to innovate and grow on the network. To date, the program has received 289 applications, averaging 64 applications per month and exceeding expectations.
The program provides grant support for projects that focus on areas affecting the Casper ecosystem infrastructure, such as decentralized applications (dApps), DeFi, and Gaming & NFT projects that solely concentrate on Casper-specific crypto research.
Alizee shared a breakdown of grant applications, revealing that 80% of the applications were deemed relevant to the program's goal and were prequalified to jump on discovery calls, where the project and its value proposition were discussed with the Casper public network. Among the prequalified projects, 50% were decentralized applications and 20% were infrastructure projects. Interested projects can apply for a grant through the Grant Program application page.
In addition to the Accelerate Grant Program, Alizee mentioned that other initiatives would be announced to accelerate developer acquisition, such as traction-based reward programs, which incentivize developers for contributing to the growth of the Casper ecosystem by adding tooling, middleware, infrastructure, or building end-user applications. The goal is to enable a single channel where all opportunities to collaborate and build on Casper are supported. Alizee added, "We are discussing with these projects on a one-to-one basis. We want to create synergy among grant recipients and allow them to support each other."
Projects can apply for a grant at the Grant Application page.
Those interested in learning more about the projects building on Casper can visit the ecosystem page at casperecosystem.io. The page will feature grant-receiving projects in the future.
During the call, Kevin O’Brien from CasperPunks, provided an overview of the recently completed Generation 1 minting event and shared the project's future plans.
"Originally launched in 2021, CasperPunks was created to demonstrate the dynamic capabilities of NFTs on the Casper blockchain. We started with minting 100 Gen-zero CasperPunks NFTs, which have now become super rare. As we progressed, we wanted to do more with CasperPunks to showcase the potential of Casper NFTs. This led us to conduct a whitelist campaign for 10,000 Generation 1 CasperPunks Digital Collectibles that were based on Casper-CEP-78, the unique NFT standard of the Casper network."
Round 1 of Generation 1 minting event has ended and sold out recently. Round 2 is set to begin on April 12, and after that, the minting process will be made public, allowing all community participants to join on a first-come, first-serve basis. On April 17, the Generation 1 marketplace will be launched where users can buy, sell, and trade CasperPunks Gen 1 NFTs.
CasperPunks Gen 1 NFTs are designed to leverage the upgradability feature of the Casper network, enabling the addition of new utilities as new ideas and partnerships emerge. As part of the project's roadmap, CasperPunks owners will be able to play games, access partnerships, commercialize their NFTs, and gain early access to exciting Casper ecosystem projects.
CasperPunks has also announced a partnership with NBA all-star Baron Davis to expand the project's reach and relevance, as well as to introduce dynamic NFTs to new audiences through new utilities.
Kevin stated that CasperPunks’ 2024 roadmap will be determined by the community.
For more information about CasperPunks, the whitelist campaign, and the new utilities, check out casperpunks.io.
Michael Steuer, the CTO of MAKE provided further us with more details regarding Casper Wallet. After a two-week-long open beta, the new wallet went live!
Casper Wallet is a new Casper blockchain web wallet, built by MAKE, with support from the Casper Association and Casper Labs. The successor to Casper Signer, Casper Wallet offers all the features of its predecessor while introducing several improvements, including a better user interface, enhanced user experience, complete desktop browser support, future mobile compatibility, and more. You can find more details in the press release.
Michael announced that the Open Beta participants will receive their commemorative NFTs in mid-May.
You can discover its features and start using the Casper Wallet at casperwallet.io.
That’s all for the first Casper Twitter Space! Be sure to join the next call in May and don’t forget to join us in the developer community call on Discord if you fancy some technical discussions about Casper.
