Michael Steuer, President & CTO at Casper Network – Interview Series

Michael Steuer, President and CTO at Casper Network (CSPR ), is a seasoned technology executive with over two decades of experience spanning digital content, entertainment, interactive applications, and gaming. He is widely recognized for pioneering the downloadable mobile gaming era, introducing carrier-independent mobile payments in the United States, and helping spark the global multiplayer mobile skill gaming phenomenon in 2007. His background blends deep technical expertise with product strategy, monetization, and operational excellence, complemented by multiple patents in gaming, mobile, and communications technology.

Casper Network is a public, permissionless Layer-1 blockchain designed to support real-world use cases and enterprise adoption through a secure, energy-efficient Proof-of-Stake architecture. The platform emphasizes upgradable smart contracts, predictable fees, and fast finality, enabling developers and organizations to build scalable decentralized applications without sacrificing flexibility. With a strong focus on bridging traditional business requirements and blockchain innovation, Casper positions itself as an infrastructure layer for asset tokenization, decentralized finance, digital identity, and other enterprise-grade blockchain applications.

You’ve spent more than two decades building and scaling products across gaming, mobile content, and emerging tech. What initially led you toward blockchain, and how did that journey ultimately connect you to the early founding work behind Casper Labs and the broader Casper ecosystem?

I’ve always operated at the forefront of innovation. I had the good fortune to be involved in a lot of “firsts”. I rolled out the first mobile interactive applications, when that meant a text-only experience. I helped put the first downloadable game on a cellphone. I created app stores before the term existed, and let people pay for goods and services with their cell phones a few decades before Apple Pay came around.

Oftentimes, being first with something meant being too early. In adoption cycles, it often takes an inflection point before mass adoption really takes place. I helped create the mobile gaming industry, but the addressable market of people wanting to play games on their phones was negligible in those first few years. It really only took off when Apple and Google introduced their respective smartphones.

So when I was first introduced to blockchain technology in 2012, I immediately recognized the revolutionary potential for societal change, but also noticed that we were very far removed from an inflection point for mass adoption. In 2018, I and my co-founders in the Casper project recognized that the time might be right to build a blockchain that tailors to real-world needs. A blockchain that provides the rails and incorporates the constraints that are prevalent in the business world, and without which mass adoption from a business perspective would be hard to achieve.

At the same time, we saw that blockchain remained the domain of a very specific cohort of early adopters and that usage of blockchain technology was not particularly user-friendly. That, in our view, was another prerequisite for mass adoption. So we set out to tackle those challenges – to create a blockchain ecosystem that tailors to the needs of businesses while being relentlessly focused on ease-of-use for end users. And we’ve come a long way!

Casper’s origin story is unique among layer-1 networks because it was designed from the outset for enterprise adoption. From your vantage point as someone involved early on, what gaps in the market convinced you that a new blockchain architecture was needed?

Businesses, both enterprises and small and medium-sized companies, operate in the real world, where, for example, the CFO doesn’t have the same access rights to corporate data or signing authority as the marketing associate. Traditional blockchains natively provide little in the way of mirroring those real-world constraints in an on-chain environment. Casper does. Similarly, real-world applications continuously get updated. The first version you ship is hardly ever the last one. Blockchains, however, are immutable. Blockchain applications, smart contracts, in traditional Web3 environments are as well. Eventually, blockchain ecosystems recognized that smart contracts need to be updated sometimes, and they came up with all kinds of workarounds, like the so-called “proxy pattern. Unfortunately, these solutions often resulted in exploits with large financial damages. Casper provides its app builders with native upgradability on the protocol level, eliminating this concern.

As a final example, many layer-1 blockchain protocols operate on what’s referred to as “probabilistic consensus,” meaning that the more time passes (the more blocks get added to the chain), the less likely it becomes that a transaction will get reversed. This is why you often are told, when sending tokens to an exchange, for example, “please wait for 64 confirmations,” while the exchange figures out if the transaction is final or not. This uncertainty might work for crypto-native use cases and early adopters, but it is not acceptable in the real world. When you sell a multi-billion-dollar real-estate portfolio, you want to know that the asset either belongs to the seller or the buyer, not some legal purgatory that could go in either direction. To this end, Casper has instant finality. Once a transaction is executed, it is instantly irreversible and 100% reliable.

How do you describe the core value proposition of the Casper Network today for institutions and builders who may be familiar with blockchain, but not with Casper’s specific technical differentiators?

A blockchain that meets your business needs without trying to twist your real-world processes and constraints into a pretzel. A platform that is exceedingly easy to develop on. An ecosystem that is relentlessly focused on user-friendliness, resulting in better user retention and experience.

Many networks claim enterprise readiness, but Casper emphasizes upgradability, predictable fees, and security-first design. Which architectural choices do you believe most clearly set Casper apart?

There are two buckets of architectural choices that affect our enterprise readiness: on the one hand, the choices we’ve made on the protocol level, where features such as instant finality provide enterprises with the legal certainty that their on-chain activity is final, irreversible and secure. And on the other hand, the choices we’ve made in our execution environments, where we solve for a lot of common pain points natively, rather than forcing developers to come up with off-the-cuff solutions to common problems, such as contract upgradability or access rights.

Casper’s roadmap has increasingly focused on real-world use cases. Which sectors do you believe are most primed to adopt Casper in the next wave of blockchain deployment?

We are very excited about and have made solid inroads into the parking industry, as a subset of the broader hospitality industry, which we plan on focusing on as well. Let’s take the US parking industry, for example: it is a century-old industry that transacts in tens of billions of dollars each year. However, the value chain is very complicated. Lot owners work with independent operators, who work with supply aggregators to dynamically price based on demand, who work with technology providers that operate the gates, and so on. And in the end, you have the local jurisdictions like municipalities and airport authorities who collect their taxes. A lot of time and money is spent on periodic retrospective audits, reconciliation, and settlement between these parties. Distributed ledger technology is going to allow this industry to leapfrog a modernization effort that will massively improve transparency while reducing overhead. Now imagine having that in place and driving real-time settlement between all these stakeholders on-chain. You can go from an industry that settles months or quarters later and spends massive amounts on factoring, to one that settles daily. And finally, these parking lots and facilities are superb real-world assets to tokenize. With real estate properties to underpin them, they come with massive and highly predictable cash flows that translate into investor yield, while parking asset owners have ongoing needs for access to capital. It’s a perfect combination for both the investor and issuer, and a much more interesting and compelling use case for tokenization than putting T-Bills on-chain.

You’ve founded and led multiple companies, including MAKE and Playsino. How do those projects complement or inform your strategy for Casper’s growth and technical direction?

MAKE primarily gets involved in projects and industries that we believe have the capacity to drive societal change. For example, MAKE has been building technology in the public health space for nearly a decade, empowering governments around the world to make data-informed public health policy. This became particularly meaningful during the pandemic, when the impact on lives saved became clearly measurable. I have the same motivation for my work in blockchain, and with Casper specifically. I believe blockchain technology will fundamentally change how societies operate. For that to come to fruition, we have to move past the narrow use cases prevalent in our industry, predominantly trading crypto-assets, and start enabling, or at a minimum, complementing real business processes in the real world. That’s what Casper is designed to do.

Casper has made significant moves to support on-chain AI, data verification, and scalable compute. How do you see Casper’s infrastructure evolving as AI becomes a central driver of blockchain demand?

As AI moves from mostly user-controlled activity towards autonomous, agentic activity, new blockchain use cases will arise. Specifically, agents are starting to transact with each other, and what better way to do this than via decentralized protocols? With agents operating at scale, probabilistic consensus-based protocols will not suffice – an agent that’s charging its owner more the longer it computes, is not going to sit by and wait for 64 confirmations. This is an area where Casper’s instant finality can play a meaningful role. The same goes for Casper’s native access rights management – you’re not going to give your agent full control over your account and all your assets. As this space evolves, we see opportunities to solve AI-specific challenges on the native protocol level, much like we’ve done for businesses and enterprises.

As someone who has introduced major technology shifts before—carrier-independent payments, downloadable mobile games, multiplayer mobile skill gaming—how do you assess where Casper sits in the broader blockchain innovation cycle?

To be honest, I think the broader blockchain innovation cycle is in a bit of a rut from time to time. For this innovation cycle to turn into a mass adoption cycle, as an industry, we have to start thinking outside of the box. What is going to be that inflection point, that iPhone moment? The Mosaic web browser that took the then-20-year-old internet and turned it into the backbone of modern society? Not too many layer-1s seem to be thinking about that, and appear happy to just fit the existing molds. Casper, on the other hand, is obsessed with trying to break the mold. The iPhone did. Mosaic browser did. Both came down to radically improving and simplifying the user interface. Making a technology that was the domain of first adopters accessible to mainstream users.

What are the most important milestones Casper must achieve over the next 12 to 18 months to strengthen its position as a leading enterprise-focused layer-1?

Proving that tokenization of real-world assets that actually exist in the real world and that actually have cash flows in the real world (which can be tracked in near-real time on-chain) is a far more attractive proposition than tokenizing a treasury bill that’s already liquid and already accessible. There are many trillions of dollars worth of illiquid assets like that, that don’t have access to global capital markets and that investors cannot easily participate in. We’re aiming to change that, and our initial progress in the parking industry is a great first step.

For builders, enterprises, and investors evaluating Casper, what do you believe is the most misunderstood aspect of the network that deserves more attention?

I think most builders, until they first try it, have no idea how easy we’ve made it to develop applications on Casper Network. We make things accessible by meeting developers where they are – they can use languages they’re already familiar with, versus obscure, blockchain-specific languages. Their processes from the Web2 world carry over, such as end-to-end testing. And we offer a whole range of developer tooling that makes it so that builders can focus exclusively on building the core functionality of their applications, versus having to solve fundamental problems and integrations as is typically the case in other ecosystems. This is part of our secret sauce, but it may be too much of a secret!

Thank you for the great interview. Readers who wish to learn more should visit Casper Network.