In the latest X Space, Casper Association CEO Matt Schaffnit and CTO & President Michael Steuer were joined by ecosystem partners Noble A. DraKoln from Band Royalty and Maurycy Konopacki, Co-Founder of Tubbly.
You can access the recording of this session here.
Matt opened the X Space by reflecting on general progress. He noted that a lot had been accomplished over the past few months.
On the governance front, in addition to the three previous on-chain votes, the network held another one and successfully reached consensus to move Casper 2.0 onto the testnet. Matt extended a big salute to Casper’s engineering team and all those who contributed to Casper 2.0's going live on the testnet.
He also shared a personal summary of his event calendar this year. “In January, I was in Davos. Last month, I called in from ETH Denver. And I just came back last week from NBX, or Next Block Conference, where I was in Warsaw,” he said. His next stop is going to be Paris Blockchain Week and he invited the community to meet up there.
On the ecosystem side, Matt concluded with a teaser: “We’ve also made some serious progress within the ecosystem team over the last few weeks, and I’m excited to share more of the fruits that bear in the not-too-distant future.”
Michael took the stage next and confirmed that Casper 2.0 went live on testnet on March 18. "We saw over 98% of the testnet stakes stage the upgrades on time, which is just a tremendous participation level," he said.
He summarized the work behind 2.0 and what it brings: "This upgrade to 2.0 took somewhere around two years of development time. It comprises somewhere around 3,500 commits on GitHub, hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and not just one or two features or improvements, but a whole new consensus protocol, a whole new execution engine and virtual machine, various gas model changes, contract staking and much, much more.”
He also credited the core engineering team for the smooth rollout. "The network upgrade took a few minutes and everything kept on rolling. This is a tremendous accomplishment by the core engineering team."
Testnet is now running on Zug, Casper’s new consensus protocol, which is leaner and more flexible compared to Highway and has the potential to significantly boost the performance of the network.
Michael also highlighted the new execution engine. "We shipped an entirely new execution engine with Casper 2.0 and we have started holding monthly recurring developer previews," he said, reminding the audience that the next preview would take place on March 27. You can join the next preview here, and access the recording of the previous sessions on our YouTube channel.
He then moved on to SDKs, "We have released SDKs for developers and exchanges to be ready for Casper 2.0. They can upgrade, and they’re in the process of upgrading now because all these SDKs are both forward and backward compatible."
In addition, migration guides have been published, and the team is working closely with exchanges. "You’ll see on a near-daily basis announcements of downstream parties being ready and prepared for Casper 2.0, including all the major exchanges,” added Michael.
For dApp developers using CSPR.click, Michael confirmed that the libraries have also all been updated for Casper 2.0 and those can be implemented now.
"We are into the last miles of preparing for the Casper 2.0 upgrade of mainnet, which at this point mostly involves making sure that downstream parties are ready.”
On the ecosystem front, Michael noted that Casper will soon be celebrating its fourth mainnet anniversary on March 31st.
Season 3 of CSPR.fans has launched with strong engagement and a new game called “Fantom Run” will be live within a week.
The entire CSPR Suite is now Casper 2.0 ready, including cspr.live, Casper Wallet, CSPR.market, and CSPR.studio.
Regarding wallet integrations, Michael confirmed that the MetaMask Snap for Casper is now fully 2.0 compliant and undergoing an audit with ConsenSys. Ledger integration updates are being finalized in collaboration with Zondax, and Tangem is also working on compatibility.
On staking, Michael said, "One of the features that I mentioned that is going live with 2.0 is contract-based staking, which unlocks liquid staking possibilities." He reported that RWY Protocol had completed its smart contracts and began testing them on testnet.
Michael confirmed that Wise Lending, which is a top liquidity provider on Uniswap V2, is integrating with Casper as its first non-EVM chain. The smart contracts are being developed by the Odra team and will undergo a Halborn audit.
He added that Router Protocol is finalizing remediation steps following its Halborn audit. "We expect that to be completed in the next couple of weeks as well, which will provide bridging capability for Casper with over 50 blockchains in the wider web3 ecosystem."
Michael confirmed that Casper will have a presence at multiple conferences in 2025:
He said all events, including community events like X Spaces, DeFi Working Groups, and Validator Connect Calls, will soon be trackable on an event calendar at casper.network.
Finally, Michael talked about the improvements in documentation. The DevRel team is going through an extensive update of the Casper documentation. “We're restructuring and refocusing our documentation to be more goal-oriented." He explained that content would be optimized by user personas, such as developers, end users, and node operators, and structured as end-to-end journeys.
Noble A. DraKoln, Co-founder of Band Royalty, a blockchain-powered music rights platform and publisher, joined the X Space to talk about how their project is tackling key problems in the music industry leveraging the Casper blockchain.
He stated that the music industry is rife with loss and misattribution. “Billions of dollars a year don’t go to the right royalty holders or sit in slush funds in various collection agencies.”
Noble described the current state of the music business as opaque and outdated. He explained that most of the ongoing problems stem from missing or incorrect metadata, and misnaming of songs, artists, writers, or performers, all of which prevent royalties from reaching the right people.
He stressed that Band Royalty is not just creating music NFTs. “We quickly realized that that wasn’t enough. We needed to combine the real world, or the Web2 world, of how this information is gathered, and then create both security and transparency.”
The platform has since built out end-to-end infrastructure. “We can distribute music in over 200 different digital service providers,” Noble said. “We have our own sync platform, so we can put music on movies and television and video games. We also are our own music publishing company, and have signed and teamed up with some of the top co-publishers in the world.”
Because Band Royalty handles all aspects, publishing, distribution, and sync, Noble said they are positioned to ingest large amounts of data and surface accurate financial records for rights holders.
“We’re 360-degree all around, seeing where the royalties come from and collecting them,” he said and explained that their full-stack approach allows Band Royalty to bring real-world income from music into the Web3 environment, putting that income on-chain and making it verifiable.
“We’re super excited to work with the Casper Association to put it out there and just drive that narrative forward,” Noble stated.
Michael supported Noble’s comments, adding, “At Casper, we think Web2 and Web3 need to get married, and we’d like to be the glue that holds it all together, because real-world use cases, such as Band Royalty, require the traditional world and the Web3 world to co-exist.”
Maurycy, Co-founder of Tubbly, spoke next. Tubbly is a Casper-based game that encourages users to walk and visit real-world locations and earn rewards. was the next guest. The project recently ran a move-to-earn airdrop campaign with Casper.
Maurycy stated, "Last time when I was here, we had 50,000 users. Now we have almost 100,000 users." He said they plan to reach half a million users by the end of 2025.
He described Tubbly’s recent feature rollout, including in-app mystery boxes, and announced plans for additional gamification.
Regarding the Casper collaboration, he said, "The airdrop campaign was about collecting CSPR in Tubbly for two days. Users could go for a walk and collect CSPR in spots visible on the map."
The airdrop happened during one of the biggest events in Europe, the Next Block Expo in Warsaw, but anyone around the world could participate.
The campaign brought in 5,000 users and resulted in over 10,000 token claims. He also confirmed that Tubbly now includes a built-in CSPR Wallet, allowing users to send, receive, and export their private keys.
The next Casper X Space is scheduled for April. Stay tuned and join the conversation as Casper moves into an exciting new phase!
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