Michael Steuer is President and CTO of the Casper Affiliation, the Swiss non-profit behind Casper Community, a proof-of-stake Layer 1 constructed for regulated real-world belongings and funds between AI brokers. Born in Amsterdam and primarily based in Los Angeles for greater than twenty years, Michael has spent round 30 years in expertise. That features a stint as CTO for cellular at THQ, the place his staff shipped a few of the first downloadable cellular video games. He then co-founded Casper in 2018, constructed a lot of its ecosystem tooling via his firm MAKE, and returned to steer the undertaking in 2024.
Why you must hear
Casper’s origin story begins inside Ethereum’s personal analysis group, the place its proof-of-stake design was first developed. Michael and his co-founders wagered that enterprises would want one thing Ethereum wasn’t going to ship shortly: a sequence that corporations with hundreds of current engineers may construct on utilizing the languages, testing and deployment processes they have already got. Simply as necessary was certainty. Michael explains why the probabilistic finality retail customers tolerate, ready via confirmations earlier than an change releases funds, is unacceptable for an establishment transferring billions. Throughout that window no one can say who’s legally accountable for the cash, so Casper was designed so {that a} transaction belongs to the recipient from the very subsequent block. He applies the identical realism to tokenization. Minting a token that claims to signify an asset takes a minute, he says, however making that token confer enforceable rights is the exhausting half. By the ERC-3643 customary and the T-REX Community, Casper is working to make compliance information, equivalent to investor eligibility, jurisdictional limits and holding intervals, journey with an asset because it strikes between chains.
The second half of the dialog turns to what Michael sees because the bigger alternative. Cloudflare now studies that bots generate extra internet visitors than people, but virtually no web site can promote something to them. Signal-ups, logins, card kinds and terms-and-conditions containers have been all constructed for folks. His reply is x402, a dormant fee code from the early HTTP specification that Coinbase and Circle revived as a typical for brokers to pay per request. Casper is a founding member of the x402 Basis, which now sits underneath the Linux Basis, and settles these funds in its personal greenback stablecoin, csprUSD. Payouts.com not too long ago adopted Casper because the settlement rail for its AI agent merchandise. Michael argues that corporations blocking brokers are turning away most of their guests. He additionally expects stablecoin tribalism to vanish, as a result of an agent shouldn’t care which greenback it spends.
That emphasis on ease of use is the thread via the ultimate stretch. Michael says crypto’s utilization stays within the single-digit percentages of the worldwide inhabitants after 16 years largely as a result of the trade made it so exhausting to make use of, from seed phrases to incompatible wallets, and warns in opposition to repeating that mistake with brokers and tokenized belongings. He makes the case for the CSPR token as a utility asset whose worth tracks community utilization, citing a staking yield he places at round 10 to 11 p.c alongside native liquid staking, and the current Kraken itemizing for US entry. Within the scorching take spherical he calls himself a multi-chain opportunist and argues that blockchain ought to by no means attempt to be the reply to all the things. He predicts a decade outlined by the convergence of TradFi and DeFi and by agentic visitors approaching totality. He additionally notes that most individuals don’t notice they’ll maintain tokenized inventory publicity in a pockets and borrow in opposition to it, and names Basis as his sci-fi choose.
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