[00:00:00] Joe Benso: Welcome to the Casper Podcast, where we take a deep dive into blockchain technology and speak with those who are building the future of the decentralized web. I'm your host, Joe Benso, and on today's show, we're recapping our recent trip to Paris Blockchain Week. This year's conference was action-packed, and while there's way too much to squeeze into a single podcast on today's show, we're going to try to hit the high notes and give you a general overview of the most notable moments.

[00:00:30] Joe Benso:  It's day one at Paris Blockchain Week. Right now I'm headed over to catch up with Ralf Kubli, who just gave us a keynote talk on the main stage. Hey Ralf, thanks for taking a minute to catch up with us on the ground here in Paris for the Casper podcast. Can you tell the listeners what's going on?

[00:00:48] Ralf Kubli: Well, I'm very excited we're in Paris at Paris Blockchain Week, which is the biggest event in Europe around blockchain. It's really exciting to see all the developers who are stopping by at our booth, which is quite sizable, but we also need it because there are so many people stopping by. We can see a lot of interest in Rust-based environments.

[00:01:05] Ralf Kubli: So today I personally had the opportunity to speak to several developers who are really getting into Rust because I like the language and the infrastructure. At Casper, we're really excited to provide abstraction layers in order to build smart contracts with Odra in this Rust environment for Casper specifically.

[00:01:23] Ralf Kubli: We're also quite excited about what is happening with the community. So NFTs with real functionalities. It's really exciting to see what's going on. And it's also quite nice to see the first meme coins on Casper, which are quite significant in value already. It's also quite exciting to see NFTs brought by the community onto Casper with functionality. So a little bit under the radar, but still, with value and with quite interesting functionality.

[00:01:51] Joe Benso: Ralf, we were here one year ago. So what's happened since then? And can you update the listeners on any significant or notable progress over the last year? At the Casper Association.

[00:02:02] Ralf Kubli: So there's a few areas that we set out are really important, right? One was access. So just in the past months, say six to three to six months, we have added a lot of access to Casper. So not only do we have more exchanges, but we also have more on-ramps and off-ramps, which are quite widely used by the crypto community overall in many markets. That is very exciting to us.

[00:02:27] Ralf Kubli: It's also exciting to see an abstraction layer, basically on Casper coming to life. Odra is one example, but at the same time, we have a much, much broader environment with our partner MAKE, which is called the CSPR suite, which abstracts away a lot of the busy work that developers have in other environments.

[00:02:48] Ralf Kubli: So you can easily integrate wallets in your application with one SDK within minutes. You could use the self-custodial wallet, the Casper Wallet. Both Android and iOS-enabled to launch your application in a secure environment and with a really nice UX, and UI environment. And what I personally find really interesting is, you know, there's an area where you can mint NFTs in essentially a no code, almost no code, low code environment. And especially great is that you can store the underlying in IPFS and Filecoin-enabled environment, truly decentralized.

[00:03:27] Joe Benso: You just got off the main stage where you were giving your keynote presentation. Who was the audience and what was your message to them?

[00:03:34] Ralf Kubli: Well, we see a lot of high-quality attendees that really care about the technology. On stage, I had the privilege to really mention why are we in this technology. And of course, we are in this technology because blockchain is the foundational layer of future economic systems.

[00:03:50] Joe Benso: Thanks Ralf, and congrats on the great keynote. It probably goes without saying that networking and relationship building is one of the most important aspects of attending a conference like Paris Blockchain Week.

[00:04:04] Joe Benso: But it's a four-day conference and here on day one we're going to play it safe, wrap this day up early, and head out first thing tomorrow. So obviously I started day two with a croissant and coffee and made the 10-minute walk over to the world-famous Nouvrach complex where the conference was going down.

[00:04:20] Joe Benso: And I gotta be honest, I just love walking through Paris. As I walk into the convention, it's obvious that today's crowd is much bigger, and livelier, and at the Casper booth, I'm greeted by Zaf from AZTEQ Metaverse, who's eager to pitch his Metaverse company to Killer Whales. We're here with Zaf from AZTEQ Metaverse at Paris Blockchain Week, at the Casper booth, pitching to be on Season 2 of Killer Whales. Casper is a sponsor. Zaf, tell us about AZTEQ Metaverse.

[00:04:50] Zaf Khan: Thank you Joe for the opportunity. So we're introducing the world's first web3 native ultra-high capacity metaverse that's open to everybody and the way we position it is it's GameFi for everyone. And the key about GameFi is it's really that crossroads between social media, gaming, and decentralized finance.

[00:05:10] Zaf Khan: So we've created an environment in a 3D simulated world where we can extend that social media, gaming, and financial services experiences for people beyond a two-dimensional browser-based interaction. So we've now given them a three-dimensional avatar with costumes that they can actually change and adapt for themselves.

[00:05:29] Zaf Khan: They then get to own those costumes and those outfits. One of the things that we've done to make sure that you really encapsulate all that immersion is we've partnered with some of the greatest digital collaborations that we could possibly find. And that includes for us, Pokemon, Disney, Star Wars: Mandalorian, Transformers, Barbie Magic: the Gathering, and the list goes on. We're continuing to build up that library to really deliver an immersive and fun experience for our players.

[00:06:01] Joe Benso: So there have been a number of players creating metaverses, allowing people to participate in ways like this, and what sets you guys apart?

[00:06:08] Zaf Khan: That's a great question. I would say we're really good students.So one of the things that we did was we learned as much as we possibly could about the metaverses that had already been built before, what works, what didn't work and where we needed to actually extend the experience as a new direction.

[00:06:24] Joe Benso: As Zaf went on to explain what sets AZTEQ Metaverse apart, I was reminded of why myself and so many other people are drawn to this space. Web3 founders are passionate about building things and it's absolutely contagious. I'm crossing my fingers that we'll see him on season two of Killer Whales.

[00:06:47] Joe Benso: While on-site, I also wanted to catch up with Matt Schaftnit from the Casper Association who often co-hosts this podcast together. Matt, I know you're busy, we're all busy here at Paris Blockchain Week, but in your own words, what's happening?

[00:07:02] Matt Schaffnit: Hey Joe, it's great to be here again, second year in a row at Paris Blockchain Week. Spirits are high. Energy's high. The crowd continues to get more and more sophisticated. We're both seeing that I'm super excited to see some of the new projects that are coming through the pipeline.

[00:07:15] Joe Benso: We will get to some of those promising projects in the Casper pipeline here in a minute. But first I want to ask you, what has the Casper Association been doing over the last year to bring builders into the Casper ecosystem?

[00:07:28] Matt Schaffnit: First and foremost, I think it's fair to reiterate what the focus for the Casper ecosystem from the Association side is in 2024 capability and access. What does that even mean? So from a capability standpoint, we're acutely focused on the network releases. We're talking about Condor and we're talking about the Odra framework. These things are moving the network miles and miles ahead. And I think that the community should be really excited about these things. When we're talking about access. And you're looking at like, where can I  go to actually use my tokens and deploy them? So that's not only exchanges but DEXs. And I'm happy to report over the last five months, the Casper Association has successfully onboarded four new exchanges.

[00:08:13] Matt Schaffnit: I think that that's going to provide some much-needed liquidity to the ecosystem, but also provide a platform for dApps that are launching tokens on the Casper Network. To have a forum where they can actually showcase what they're doing and have a chance to take it to the next level. So I'm really, really excited to be unlocking that piece of the ecosystem.

[00:08:34] Joe Benso: That's very cool. What about the long term? What are you excited about?

[00:08:38] Matt Schaffnit: Other things long-term that I'm excited about, I guess would be the research we're doing around ZK Rollups. The support that we're giving to the ACTUS financial standards, right? These algorithmic financial contracts that I think are going to change the way that the world actually interacts from an economic standpoint.

[00:08:57]Matt Schaffnit: And so I think there's a lot of exciting things to happen here at the Casper ecosystem, but in the broader ecosystem as well. And it's a multi-chain universe and we're excited to be a part of it.

[00:09:07] Joe Benso: Yeah, Matt, you mentioned our support of ACTUS and Smart Financial Contracts. Why are these important?

[00:09:12] Matt Schaffnit: Right now, when you look at tokenization and what they're doing in the whole real-world asset movement, it's not really novel in my opinion. The reason it's not novel is that we've had digital securities for eons, right? Since the 60s. What is novel is using smart contracts against a standard that will allow scalability and programmatically be able to track these financial arrangements. At the end of the day, a lot of folks get confused about what finance really is, and it computes innovations and payments with innovations in finance, but payments are on the fringes of finance.

[00:09:54] Matt Schaffnit: It's the financial contracts that are the molecular structure of the financial markets and the economy at large. And so that's why I'm excited about focusing our attention there because this is where I believe a huge impact will occur. Blockchain is a slow database and we obviously need to be able to wrap certain things off-chain and on-chain to allow for not only efficiency but security.

[00:10:20] Matt Schaffnit: In order to be able to operate in a trustless environment, you need things like to validate the credibility of the counterparties that you're dealing with. And to be able to do that in a way that doesn't require you to disclose all your details, I think is a tremendous value. So in today's environment, if you call your bank or you call someone at your mobile provider, they want to validate who you are. You have to give them certain pieces of information in the United States. That might be your social security number in other places, something else, irrespective of what it is, a wild opportunity for your identity to be compromised and zero-knowledge proofs provide a potential solution to protect not only our identities but our value and our assets.

[00:11:04] Joe Benso: Absolutely. And I agree that ZK proofs are going to be game-changing. So what are you looking forward to most in 2024?

[00:11:11] Matt Schaffnit: My biggest hope is that we have a smooth rollout of Condor and we get into a nice cadence with our tech stack. The liquidity is opening up with the new entrance of DEXs and other things that are coming together. The community has been extremely patient, but that's the name of the game. At the end of the day. I believe in the duck mentality. Cool on the surface, paddle like hell underneath.

[00:11:38] Joe Benso: Quack, quack. Well, that's about all the time we've got. After all, blockchain moves fast. And if you like these conversations, be sure to subscribe to the Casper Podcast on your favorite platform. You could also leave us a voice message for your chance to appear on a future episode. So I want to thank everyone on the ground who made Paris Blockchain Week a huge success. And until next time keep building and we will see you on the next episode of the Casper Podcast.