Casper protocol growth and new NFT standards

0:00I'm Ashton Addison from blockwest capital for investment pitch media and today on the crypto coin show we have Ralph kubli board member of the Casper Association Ralph welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time today well thanks a lot for having me you're very welcome um I've been following Casper Network for a few years now and excited to hear

0:21about the latest developments uh that the team has been working on but I'd love to kick off our conversation together with just hearing a little bit about your background and how you got into blockchain and how that really LED you to being a board member with the Casper Association and then we'll dive into all the latest details thanks a lot to Ashton so yeah I started

0:43my University time just when the internet started to become really interesting and the web too so to speak it came with graphical user interfaces so that was in the early 90s so I I obtained my first email in 93 I called it HTML 94 to 96 so many of your listeners many relations probably were not even born then but and uh and then curiously 96 I I left

1:14the space I basically stopped coding HTML I don't remember why but they're very very um successful family member who was in the computer industry suggested in 1995 that I stopped going to the university now and stopped studying and go to the US I lived in Switzerland at the time and go to the US and learn everything about the the web and I didn't do that

1:41in 95 so and then I finished my studies and I started working in industrial environments and I did all kinds of things classic management career and then in 2015 I came across ethereum I mean I knew about Bitcoin but I came across ethereum 1516 and I started to understand the potential of the technology and I got really excited and I said this is I was I'm given a second

2:07chance in life so I better I better take it and I I put all effort in you know in 2016 to get into the space and to find employment then I ended up with a venture capital firm here in Switzerland that invested in early stage startups in blockchain and you know also took an active role and enhancing and making sure that the regulatory environment in Switzerland is is advantageous for the

2:35technology and I I got very excited and that's how I got into the space today I'm active as a board member of the Casper Association and and I support some other projects as well it's very cool and I know that Switzerland is like a great hub for for crypto growth and Innovation so it's great to hear that you've had a part in that and making sure you know the

2:58regulatory side is is proper which is an important aspect especially right now with the recent events in cryptocurrency um and now I'm curious on you know moving into the board member position at the Casper Association and a Casper Network you know maybe you can talk a little bit about Casper why you think it's a great protocol and a little bit of the history leading up to now

3:24sure so the founders of the Casper protocol or the technology started really well I wanted to overcome the fundamental problems of adoption in of this technology of blockchain and blockchains in general and you know both manohar and meta Harley car come from Enterprise environments and they said hey we believe that adoption and also you know mastered

3:55option must come from technology that can be easily integrated into existing application environments and that is really the you know principles upon which we have built this technology and are continuing to build this technology and that Finds Its expression in a few ways so at the time when Casper Labs was founded and you know the work on the core protocol was started

4:21um four years ago the choice of rust was a was a very early choice and and there were there were not many protocols that were building on Ross today you know it is the winning language and probably the main language that these blockchain infrastructure is being developed on and another aspect is the modularity of the the modularity of the of the blockchain

4:43and so we you know we have built it we have built this blockchain in a way that certain elements can be upgraded independently so we recently upgraded the database or changed the database and the team is working on a new consensus mechanism it's important to note that we are not an evm compatible chain um we have our own VM and you know and account models and um

5:12account models and uh and uh sorry contract management will be merged in in one of the next releases so so it is this kind of environment and and also the other aspect is we we would like to use developer environments and developer tools that are already known to very large numbers of developers and not create our own or or not spend you know resources time of all the developers

5:39creating like testing environments for example definitely all great information sort of leading up to becoming a protocol that can have an expansive development ecosystem that enables more dapps to come out easier I know the growth of D5 and nfts as well on Casper which I'm sort of looking forward to to seeing happen um is with with most recent Network

6:07developments at Casper is that is this at a turning point where all that is started to be capable or or is that already happening so yeah so obviously you know it's still early in the technology I think we have we have a good platform there are already productive environments deployed on Casper um so you know it's important to note that while we we sometimes are perceived

6:34to have only an Enterprise Focus that is certainly not the case we just think that Enterprise technology should be made available in this space you know to a very large number of users and it just happens so that you know if you build Enterprise grade technology you know you should also have a lot of Enterprises wanting to use it so when we look at some of the use cases that are currently

6:57being pursued uh obviously you know we are building some of these E5 Primitives we have you know early implementations of tokens and token standards on Casper um and what I'm particularly excited about is uh you know several use cases so one is you may laugh about it but I think it's still a fun upon use cases metacast which is a which is a rare risky task nft Marketplace so you know

7:28it basically makes an an uh acid an asset class which is Rare whiskey accessible to an NFP Marketplace so I think it's very interesting the other aspect is ipv I mean it's widely published ipvip.we.com is a productive environment on Casper which which already today means IP as nfts on Casper so you have IP represented on

7:58Casper and obviously the target here is both inventors creators but as well as you know Enterprises that use this environment for Enterprise IP lifecycle management mm-hmm yeah the nft industry is is fascinating I'm curious on which way it's going to continue to grow and sort of what sectors outside of of web3 and finance will next adopt this technology and as

8:27you mentioned at the beginning Casper network is you know it's not like an evm chain and normally a lot of these nfts are on some kind of ERC uh nft standard but I'm guessing Casper has to build out its own standards for nfts and go through those hurdles of adoption of the wallets or the infrastructure how how does Casper work on that and how do

8:55you sort of compete with the network effect of the standards that have already been created in nfts and improve upon those yeah that's a big challenge obviously so one aspect is we have the advantage that we you know we do have Enterprise users right we have a lot of different environments and and Casper Labs as an implementation partner to Enterprises

9:19basically has a privileged position to understand what these companies want and what you know it will be the next applications at the same time on the association side you know which is really about the Community applications tabs you know wide adoption and developer tools we are focused also on nfts and I I have published or we have published The

9:46Association has published nfts as one of the priority areas and I'll explain to you in a second why I believe this is very important but yes of course we have to create our own standard we obviously copied 720 to ALC 721 and all those standards early on but we believe that you know they are either lacking in security or you know they are not meeting the requirements and not just

10:11of companies but of any projects because they are just not very flexible and and they're not very adoptable and adaptable so we have created the standard which you can choose actually whether you know the nft that you're creating is mutable or immutable so uh you know we have metadata fields that can be changed depending on you know what you choose at

10:37the beginning at the Inception and um because we have a very flexible account model you can actually manage these nfts in these contracts afterwards much more flexible than than in other environments with with tools that you would normally expect as a as a developer you know to be available and in other environments you have to create all those smart contracts you have that

11:01smart contracts rule all those smart contracts and we we eliminate a lot of those items the reason why I'm so excited about the reason why I'm so excited about you know nfts is not because of nfts or because of jpegs and yet another you know you get another project uh putting out a lot of uh a lot of jpegs and mint and made the pop because I truly believe

11:28that this technology now enables you to claim property to obviously digital items seamlessly right because once they're digital you can claim basically property and you can document prop your property rights but it really allows you know individuals creators companies projects to completely in a new way and much more efficient way assert ownership

11:58and enable use of intellectual property any kind of property um you know in a way that will create and enable so much economic activity and completely change the way how economies work and economies work so that that's why I'm so excited about this and when you think about nfts or what it really represents I personally started talking about

12:26cryptographically secured property rights a while ago and it just happened so that cryptographically secured property rights are cspr so I'm very excited about that's very cool definitely and you mentioned there about you know security issues in nfts and you know the expansive ecosystem of nfts on ethereum and the evm

12:54compatible smart contract platforms you know there's even though the smart contracts have been around for a long time there's still a lot of security vulnerabilities in in those in this way that the smart contracts are out right and I I've seen countless times where you know some celebrity has an nft and all of a sudden it's stolen from their wallet or they approve some smart

13:16contract that has malicious code and there's a lot of them and all of a sudden the nfts are siphoned out of their wallet so I appreciate the the concern there on the security side and that's one of the fundamentals that I think it needs to be put in place you know with Casper's smart contracts to ensure that everything is you know obviously it works well but that there's

13:37no flaws in the system at all yeah the other aspect is uh you know the the issue here is also that we've kind of created a centralized system still right I mean it doesn't make sense that you have an nft in your wallet and the underlying is not controlled it is controlled by a centralized entity that kind of doesn't make sense defeats the purpose now they're they're obviously

14:05there are so many questions that are not solved right so key management for Creator imagine that in the future really musicians and creators but it could also be people that develop new code right it could be the people that develop formulas chemical formulas or you know or biotech Etc I mean they have a real opportunity to document their inventions and also commercialize their

14:32inventions and monetize their inventions in completely different ways but then of course we bet or not give the power again to centralized institutions that hold the data and the files right we also need to decentralize where this is store work we need to make sure that it's securely stored decentralized Etc so that those are all questions that um they don't keep me up at night but

14:56they certainly keep me busy during the day definitely and you know mentioning there about just inventors and you know housing markets and all these thousands of different industries that have yet to tap into this technology probably partially because of you know the infancy of it and the security vulnerabilities that we're seeing on the mainstream platforms once that's fixed

15:17I'm really looking forward to seeing how Casper grows into those Industries and hopefully you know these industries adopt uh Casper standard for nfts and and can bring that digital ownership uh and and transferability to the people that that need it you know um and because you're pretty early on in this and you really need to make sure that the smart contract aspect of it is

15:45um is laid out properly I feel like looking through Casper and following along doing interviews over the past few years with the team the Casper protocol um you know the the growth of it in the market cap is actually already fairly large you know considering that it's there's still a lot of stuff to be flushed out um how do you see Casper positioned uh out

16:12of the smart contract platforms uh you know at the top ones and do you consider Casper to sort of be in that top tier yes we do I mean obviously we believe that looking at our peers so which would be smart Contracting platforms is more important than just the ranking you know in a you know on the market cap itself um we also believe and I mean we I think

16:38it's well worth to note that we record this you know on November 11th just after you know major challenges in the entire infrastructure of our industry I think it's very important to note that we believe it still comes down to the technology that you build right so which is why um lucky or not intended or not deliberate or not we need to point out

17:07that you know tvl may not be the end goal and you know it is really about the applications in the end that live on these infrastructures which is why we believe as I said that we should be compared and we are they prepare ourselves to a Smart Contracting platforms obviously we like industry um you know platform I mean industry um you know information hubs like

17:31Missouri where you can see these smart Contracting platforms where we are probably always ranked between 120 and 30 considering who is ahead of us uh depending on how you look at some of these platforms I would say we're probably top 15 of the more serious projects that are technology oriented so I think those are areas that that we have to remind ourselves again you know

17:55on this day and probably this this coming weeks also when this is published that it's in the end it's it's early it's about the technology and it's about the way that we built the technology so it can be used by a very large amount of developers and that is what we set out to do and that's what the course that we have taken from the beginning and that

18:17we will continue over the next you know few videos well said Ralph and speaking of you know having a large community I I was looking through you know the Enterprise side which I think is a competitive Advantage for for Casper um you know focusing on these large clients because there are huge companies that continually are looking to find ways to take advantage of this

18:41technology and I saw that Casper was working with IBM you know one of the biggest um can you talk about you know the Enterprise side and that partnership with IBM yeah I can talk a little bit about it obviously I am with the Casper Association so our task is to really Foster the open source community and find you know enough people and more people to contribute to this to this

19:05great protocol and Casper Labs which is independent from the Casper Association but the large contributor to the core of the technology of course you know they are targeting large corporate not any size corporation not just large but they're inside they're targeting you know Enterprise use cases that they want to develop with their customers on Casper obviously so

19:30we're very excited that that IBM has also publicly stated that this is interesting technology there are Atomic swaps between hyper Electro Fabric and Casper um there are quite a few people surprisingly when you when you start looking in the in the marketplace that have built and are building on hyperledger but they need some kind of public Outlet right so maybe the future

19:56is not only multi-chain but the future is also probably more hybrid than we think of today so we believe we believe there is a space for you know private chains hybrid environments and public environments and and I think you know to be able to operate on that spectrum is is key for any of the technology providers going forward um in addition we have to say it's also

20:22key for the developer Community right because in the end developers want to contribute relevant technology that is being used in the world and while you know I I think I I said in in beginning how I came to to the technology I mean you know as a true Enthusiast in 2015-16 that saw the opportunity for this technology to build you know a more Equitable Society to

20:49provide more control for creators over their contributions to you know to allow people to monetize their contributions or their work you know in a different way in the future this is huge but at the same time we should not forget that in the end you know we would like to get paid for our work and you know a lot of economic activity still comes from companies and and our

21:13and it must be our goal that we equip developers with the tools and the infrastructure necessary to contribute to the open source code base and obviously this is true for all the projects right but to open source code base now in our case Casper that enables you know new ways of Economic Development improve Society but also of course provides infrastructure for economic interactions

21:42that are you know governed by companies basically right so new business models that we cannot think of today should be built on this technology it's very exciting and looking forward throughout you know obviously this is this is a long journey ahead to expand the ecosystem to where you the team wants Casper to be looking at the next six month or one year roadmap for 2023

22:09what do you think are some of the major things that Casper needs to roll out next to get to that next stage of development yeah so we've stated quite a few times to the community we you know we we are not the easiest chain to engage with uh because of uh you know you have to be committed to find the documentation that you want to find and uh the world users

22:31want to use so we're going to improve that that's a that's a very short-term um target for us and it will be available so hopefully even by the time this is published you know there will be a lot better infrastructure for developers to find resources and to interact with us so that's one area the second area is um standards there will be more standards more Primitives released and

22:55also made available very important so people you know can save a bit of time but they can also see how was what was implemented and how it works so so those are two areas that are very important to us then when you think about the improvements to the protocol and the upgrades we will be releasing 1.5 in the near future but our goal is to get to it 2.0 0

23:182.x version within the next six to nine months I would say the latest maybe four to six months where you know some really groundbreaking Innovations will be will become reality and and we control the community and also the larger world what it can mean to build on Casper and why we believe that we are so future-proof so so those are some areas maybe I want to say something around

23:44Capital markets and finance briefly so we believe um we have started a number of projects around this topic of how the finance industry both Legacy but also the Future Finance industry in D5 so both C5 and D5 can benefit from blockchain technology and we believe that we have some exciting technology

24:12coming out we cannot talk a lot about it but there will be you know announcement around how Legacy Financial Services firms actually use the Casper technology to bring efficiency transparency and also automation you know to their business model and to the financial industry wow that's a big one uh well I'm looking forward to all those updates

24:38and what is the best way Ralph to follow along with the updates and as you mentioned you know talking to the community about more documentation more communication uh what are the best channels to stay in touch with the Casper team so we have a very responsive Discord environment so if you really are a developer you should definitely I mean you are on this code already but you

25:00should join our Discord environment and these conservance there is also very active community in many languages also present on this Discord channel so in case you know you're more comfortable in another language than English there's there's quite a few communities there then of course Twitter is somewhat active for us we have a lot of Twitter followers and telegram is basically like

25:25many projects the place to to really come but on the on the Discord side so if you're more technically interested uh Community member or you know or programmer you should really look at at Discord there are always people responding to your questions there's tech support and we have also a fairly disciplined and unfortunately centralized but that is makes brings a

25:52few efficiency response response system for technical requests that we that we answered great thank you so much Ralph I will leave all those Social Links as well in the description box below to make it easy for the viewers to follow along I appreciate your insights into to Casper and where the protocol is going I'm really looking forward to seeing the

26:17updates that you mentioned there and let's definitely follow up in the near future uh when we when those updates roll out and we can talk about how the protocol continues to expand so thank you so much for the time today thank you Ashton great to be here it's an awesome show I I really like all the quality speakers that you have great senior thank you