"Blockchain for corporations: Casper (CSPR) overview
The race among Tier 1 blockchains is getting fiercer as dozens of new decentralized protocols are released almost every month. Each tries to bring something new to the crypto industry, but they often become typical, similar solutions with almost no prospects.
What is Casper?
Casper Network is a first-level blockchain focused on integration with companies and developers. The creators position the Casper Network as an energy-efficient enterprise-level blockchain platform.
According to Casper's developers, one of the main reasons preventing the integration of blockchain ecosystems into traditional businesses was the lack of certain features in most decentralized tier-one protocols.
Casper Network is behind CasperLabs, a company founded in late 2018. The CasperLabs team spent 18 months developing their blockchain protocol from scratch and did not launch the Casper test network (testnet) until March 2020. The leading network (mainnet) went live another year later, in March 2021. This played a fatal role for the CSPR project token, as it was during this period that the global correction in the crypto market began, which negatively affected the dynamics of the cryptocurrency's exchange rate.
In 2022, the CasperLabs team released the Casper 2.0 network update, which included Highway 3.0 scaling features, DeFi functionality for nodes, and smart contracts for steaking and paying for their work.
The project has raised over 88 million dollars from investment funds and through public token sales (token sales). Among funds, Hashkey Capital, Distributed Global, Arrington XRP Capital, Blockchange Ventures, Digital Strategies, and others have invested in Casper.
How does Casper work?
The Casper network is powered by Proof-of-Stake, blockchains' most popular consensus algorithm. This blockchain was the first implementation of the CBC-Casper (Correct-by-Construction) consensus protocol, providing decentralization, security, and scalability.
The CBC-Casper protocol provides consensus between validator nodes in transaction processing and block mining by forming protoblocks, including a set of pending validation transactions with block hashes.
Casper Network developers are focused on 4 major macro trends:
- tokenized economy aimed at decentralizing the financial sphere;
- digital ownership to protect copyrights;
- implementation of new financial standards (ACTUS);
- development of NFT art.
One of the critical features of the Casper network is updatable smart contracts, which allow companies to quickly adapt their decentralized applications to changing market conditions. For example, smart contracts in the Ethereum network are immutable, so developers have to issue new contracts to update an application. This is why the Uniswap V3, PancakeSwap V3, and Aave V3 protocols exist. Uniswap V2 and V3 are not just multiple protocol versions but different smart contracts.
Casper cryptocurrency
CSPR is the native cryptocurrency of the Casper network, used for all fees, staking, and other transactions.
Over 30% of CSPR issuance is allocated to the network validators and 16% to the ecosystem developers. For the team and enablers combined, 24% has been allocated — almost a quarter of all tokens, which is quite a lot.
More than 12.3 billion CSPR tokens have already been issued, of which 11.7 billion are in circulation. CSPR is an inflationary token with no issuance ceiling, and the current inflation rate is around 8% annually.
The market capitalization of CSPR exceeds $519 million. According to this indicator, the token ranks 105th in the ranking of cryptocurrencies, according to CoinMarketCap. Since listing on exchanges in May 2021, CSPR's capitalization has almost tripled.
Despite the growth of capitalization, the price, on the contrary, decreased due to the inflation of CSPR tokens. CSPR reached its absolute maximum at $1.36 almost immediately after listing. Now, the token is trading at $0.04, nearly 97% lower than ATH. CSPR is available on OKX, Bitget, HTX, KuCoin, and Gate.io exchanges but is not available on leading trading platforms such as Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken.
What are the prospects for Casper?
The Casper network can't be said to stand out from many other large Tier 1 blockchains. Given the high competition among L1 networks, many backed by even more vital funds and partners, Casper's prospects remain debatable.
Nevertheless, Casper has a reasonably well-developed ecosystem that includes major players such as Amazon Blockchain Services and Bitgo. However, in the DeFi realm, its ecosystem lags far behind the big blockchains. The Casper network isn't even listed on DeFi Llama, so it's hard to gauge the liquidity of its ecosystem. Casper is supported by only two little-known decentralized exchanges: CasperSwap and Friendly Market.
To the negative factors, we can add the lack of positive dynamics: over the past few months, the CSPR rate has barely grown despite the bull market.
New updates scheduled for 2024 in the project roadmap may remedy this. Currently in development are updates to Juliet, which will add a new protocol layer to improve security and reduce on-chain spam, and Condor, designed to further reduce transaction costs.
