Casper (CSPR)

Casper is a public Layer-1 blockchain geared toward enterprise adoption.

Basics

• Created by Casper Labs, a R&D startup vying to be the first to deliver the Casper protocol upgrade.
• Started in Q4 18
• Testnet: final testnet in Fall 2020
• Mainnet release: planned on 22-3-2021, got live on 31-3-2021
• Based in: Switzerland

History

• From a commissioned Messari report (23-12-2022):

"CasperLabs was co-founded in Q4’18 by CEO Mrinal Manohar, who previously worked in private equity and was an early Bitcoin adopter, and CTO Medha Parlikar, who previously held senior positions at various software engineering organizations.

Casper derives its name from the consensus mechanism framework Correct-by-Construction (CBC) Casper, which Casper’s own consensus mechanism, Highway, is based on. CBC Casper was designed by Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir as a potential Ethereum Proof-of-Stake (PoS) design. Zamfir published a whitepaper for CBC Casper at the end of 2017, but the Ethereum Foundation and developers ultimately chose to pursue implementation of Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG), a related consensus protocol. In early 2019, Zamfir joined CasperLabs as lead consensus protocol architect, but later left. In 2021, he filed a copyright infringement injunction against CasperLabs for their use of “Casper,” which was denied by a U.S. federal judge. Casper released its Highway Whitepaper in Q4’19, which details its implementation of CBC Casper."

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Bugs/Exploits

Had a 'security breach' and halted its network (28-7-2024). Showing signs of centralization.

Token

Launch

• From a commissioned Messari report (23-12-2022):

"In mid-2019, CasperLabs raised $14.5 million in a Series A equity round. Following two testnets, two private token sales, and a public token sale on CoinList by a Swiss non-profit entity Casper Association, the Casper Mainnet launched on March 31, 2021. "

• 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 a commissioned Messari report (23-12-2022):

"Ten billion tokens were initially minted at genesis, with no fixed supply, and they are minted at an 8% inflation rate to reward validators. The inflation rate can be adjusted through a governance vote by validators. There is currently no burn mechanism.

For the exact numbers on the initial distribution, please check the report. Roughly it was divided in the following brackets:

1. Private Sale (30%)
2. Ecosystem (29%)
3. Team and advisors (24%)
4. Public Sale (17%)"

• 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."

Utility

• CSPR, is used for transaction fees and network security (validator staking).

Technology

• Whitepaper can be found here (19-1-2023).
• Code can be viewed here.
• Consensus mechanism: PoS
• Algorithm:
• Virtual Machine:
• Development language used, from a commissioned Messari report (23-12-2022): "CasperLabs are developing a Solidity to Rust compiler called Caspiler. The Casper-JS-SDK allows dapp developers to interface with smart contracts."

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS):
• Latency:

How it works

• From a commissioned Messari report (23-12-2022):

"Highway is CasperLabs’ extension of the CBC Casper framework. It is a partially synchronous, leader-based BFT consensus protocol, similar to Hotstuff or Tendermint. However, Highway uses a direct acyclic graph (DAG) for its data structure, which has advantages in throughput and latency. Highway furthers the CBC Casper framework in two main ways:

First, Highway addresses the liveness property of consensus protocols, which guarantees that the protocol will eventually make a decision.

Additionally, Highway makes improvements in finality and flexibility. In Highway, finality is treated as a spectrum, depending on the percentage of total validator stake finalizing each block. The amount of stake finalizing a block is the amount of stake that would have to be slashed [slashing is not currently active] for a block to be reverted. Block lengths are dynamic, lasting between thirty seconds and eight minutes.

This finality design brings flexibility to the network’s nodes. Each node can have their own finality threshold, allowing them to play different roles within the ecosystem. Nodes that deal with transactions of less value could potentially have lower thresholds of finality to increase time-to-finality, and vice-versa.

Highway uses the LMD GHOST fork choice rule specified in the CBC Casper framework, which is the same rule used in Ethereum 2.0 consensus.

Casper supports upgradeable smart contracts. Casper’s smart contracts are immutable in the past but mutable in the future. This feature is aimed toward enterprises, which prefer flexibility in applications. It removes the need for complex migration processes and makes it easier to patch smart contract vulnerabilities. However, it does add trust assumptions. A user who stakes their assets in a smart contract, for example, must trust that the smart contract’s owners will not change the code in a malicious manner."

Staking

• From a commissioned Messari report (23-12-2022):

"Validators bid every era, which lasts around two hours, to participate in consensus. The top 100 bidders are selected to participate. The 100-validator limit mitigates the messaging overhead, which is high in Highway (minimum of 20k messages per block). Winning bids become the validators’ stakes, and validators’ voting weights are proportional to their stakes. There is currently no slashing mechanism, but there are future plans to penalize inactive or malicious validators by locking up their stake for an extended period of time."

Validator Stats

• 75.91% of Total Supply is staked (16-1-2023)

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Pros and Cons

Cons

Had a 'security breach' and halted its network (28-7-2024). Showing signs of centralization.

Team, Funding, Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• Mrinal Manohar; CEO
• Medha Parlikar; CTO, but was mentioned before 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”".
• From a commissioned Messari report (23-12-2022):

"Along with CasperLabs, the network is supported by the Casper Association, a Swiss non-profit entity."

• 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."