Casper (CSPR)

Basics

• Created by Casper Labs, a R&D startup vying to be the first to deliver the Casper protocol upgrade.
• Announced on:
• Testnet: final testnet in Fall 2020
• Mainnet release: planned on 22-3-2021, got live on 31-3-2021
• Based in: Switzerland

History

• Casper Labs will be an indirect competitor to Ethereum as it endeavors to deliver the much-anticipated Casper protocol upgrade. Some of their press releases hinted on building their own blockchain.

Token

Launch

• From Figment Weekly Digest (11-3-2021):

"Casper is planning to launch their mainnet on March 22nd and will be hosting a public token sale on Coinlist starting on March 23rd."

Token allocation

• From their blog (31-3-2021):

"The Casper Association has seeded DEVxDAO with 500 million CSPR tokens as of the Genesis Event and up to another 1.1 billion CSPR tokens over the next 6 years to give grants to developers with ambitious ideas for DApps and decentralized infrastructure solutions."

Technology

• Whitepaper can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed [insert here].
• Built on:

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Team, Funding, Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• Medha Parlikar; CEO (since 11-2018) of CasperLabs’ parent firm ADAPtive Holdings
• Scott Walker; chairman (the President of DNA Investment Fund)
• Steven Nerayoff; vice chairman
• Has 40 employees (22-10-2020) "Twenty-nine of them are engineers. Money’s “always gone very heavily into engineering”".
• Vlad Zamfir; former lead architect, left Ethereum to work on Casper at Casper Labs. Update (22-10-2020):

"Ethereum Foundation developer Vlad Zamfir used to advise the company. But he’d left the project by March 2020, when CasperLabs said it was pivoting away from Ethereum.". Update (21-3-2021): Vlad Zamfir sues over rights to the Casper name."

Funding

• Pre-launch funding (7-5-2020) $14.5M
• Has raised $20M in funding led by Galaxy
• "Raised $14.5 million in a Series A funding round. The round was led by financier Terren Piezer – known as the “Zelig of Wall Street” – via his personal holding company, Acuitas Group Holdings. Arrington XRP Capital, Consensus Capital, Axiom Holdings Group, Digital Strategies, MW Partners, Blockchange Ventures, Hashkey Capital, and Distributed Global also participated."
• From CoinDesk (22-10-2020):

"Blockchain startup CasperLabs has banked $14 million from investors who pledged to secure its proof-of-stake Casper network at launch. CasperLabs CEO Mrinal Manohar confirmed the private CSPR token presale to CoinDesk and further revealed that Digital Strategies had led the investment, with headline participation from HashKey Capital and Blockchange Ventures, as well as 52 others. Nearly half of subscribers already held CasperLabs equity, he said."