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Edge Of Casper Show With Joe Benso From Casper Association
NFT has undeniably been a buzzword for the past couple of years. While we are seeing its steady growth and potential, some doubts and speculations tend to tinge on its reputation. Are NFTs here to stay or will they evolve and take on a new shape? Here to answer these questions and lead us with the first of our Edge of Casper Show is Joe Benso from Casper Association. In this inaugural episode, Joe shares his thoughts on the future of NFTs along with how Casper has evolved to provide secure and authenticated NFTs. He dives deep into how they have created a unique toolset for a wide range of use cases for developers and entrepreneurs, offering something that is going to be future-proof and allow people to build using blockchain in a way that is efficient for them. From the applicability of upgradable NFTs to businesses to gamified ecosystems, Joe provides great insights that will have you anticipating what’s to come. Plus, we also review an article about the value of NFTs in the future: will they be worthless or worth more? We stand behind the latter. Tune in now!
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Edge Of Casper Show With Joe Benso From Casper Association
This is Joe Benso with the Casper Association. We’re empowering countless projects, exchanges, partners, and groundbreaking Web3 applications. I’m excited to be on the Edge of NFT empowering audiences everywhere with the countless aspects of Web3 they need to know. Enjoy.
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NFT-curious audiences, stay tuned for this episode to learn how Casper blockchain has evolved to provide secure and authenticated NFTs.
Also, why buying even more digital assets is the goal of our guest who already has some special NFTs.
Finally, we review an article called Your NFTs Are Actually—Finally—Totally Worthless. We disagree.
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Welcome to our first Edge of Casper Show. This is the beginning of amazing conversations where we oversee the evolution of Casper Network, a blockchain-supporting innovative tech giant as well as decentralized applications and platforms featuring both upgradable smart contracts and predictable gas fees. We also have a great new show called Casper Blockchain Podcast that you can check out on Spotify or by visiting Casper.Network and clicking on News.
This episode features Joe Benso of Casper Network, a meeting ground for reliability and innovation in blockchain. Joe, the Head of Content at Casper Association, hails from Zug, Switzerland, the heart of Crypto Valley. His journey began in radio and television in Los Angeles transitioning into a brand and digital strategist role for global sports and music giants.
Not only has he ignited Web3 in music startups but he is also the Cofounder of the anticipated Casper NFT drop, Outlaw Dogs. It’s the Casper blockchain universe boasts over 140 projects, exchanges, partners, and groundbreaking Web3 applications. Crafted for effortless blockchain integration, Casper supports ambitious developers and entrepreneurs propelling its ecosystem into exciting new frontiers. Joe, how are you doing?
I’m doing well. Thanks, Richard. Thanks, Josh. I appreciate that introduction. I’m excited to be here.
We’re excited to have you on. It was fun hanging out in Singapore. It feels like a long time ago. How has your jet lag been?
We have been all over the world, especially in 2023. It was great to see you in Singapore TOKEN2049. Thanks for coming to our after-hours party with the Killer Whales team, HELLO Labs, and all the other sponsors who are part of that show. I’m glad you can make it and see what was going on there. I hate jet lag but I love visiting new cities. I had never been to Singapore before. I don’t know what your experience was but it did not feel like a bear market at all. There are tons of excitement. I’m looking forward to the next event.
It was thriving over there. You had quite the crowd of not only folks from Asia but from all over the world who are excited about all the potential in the blockchain ecosystem and Casper. It was cool to see that IRL. Richard, what were your impressions?
First of all, the venue that you had is sensational. It’s the top of this cool building. You could see out into the city and the water. Music was playing. We were able to showcase the upcoming show, which was cool. It was packed in there. There’s a lot of excitement and fun. You can check out what was all said in a cool episode that’s dropping soon. I’m excited about all the cool things that Casper has going on.
We whipped together this mini recap of that party. It leads me to a conversation I want to have with you because there’s this new reality show, Killer Whales, that you are supporting, and a lot of interesting projects coming through. The VCs were active in Asia aggressively trying to figure out their alpha for what’s next. At the same time, there’s this conversation now as the NFT market continues to drop more parabolically than the blockchain market by a smidge. Where are we at with NFTs? We have been talking about utilities for a long time. Is there enough utility in terms of NFTs? What do you think?
One of the reasons why I was so excited to come on this show is because you have been on the ground for the last couple of years at least. We first caught up with you at one of the first NFT.NYC events when the market was extremely frothy. Anybody and their grandmother were trading NFTs or launching an NFT project. Where NFTs are at now is a natural cycle of when any new technology comes around, which is NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens.
At the heart of it, it excited me when I realized what smart contracts are capable of doing, what is an NFT, and how that’s going to affect multiple industries. However, when you have a lot of hype around the potential, some of those narratives get lost, especially when the things that are driving this excitement are very much rooted in the promise of earning something and making money. There was a lot of money being thrown around speculative on NFTs.
For me, it looked very similar to the ICO hype around 2017 and 2018 when everybody was creating an ICO and raising millions of dollars and ETH for their projects, which were on the backs of simple white papers, and that was about it. We have had a lot of NFT projects that also didn’t have much meat on the bones, and often, projects didn’t even understand what they could be doing with this technology.
Now that the smoke has cleared a little bit, we have gone through this cycle where a lot of these projects have died off. People realize this was a bubble but I am of the very strong belief that we will see, in my opinion, an even bigger than before wave of excitement around NFTs, whether the mass public or the people that are involved in the ecosystem continue to call it NFT because it now has such a tinged reputation. For me, it’s around the utility. It was a very cliché buzzword for a while.
I do think that we’re entering into a phase where those who have stuck around, those who have been passionate about the technology, and those who do understand what NFTs can enable, represent, and create more efficiencies and business models around a lot of industries and disrupting a lot of industries are starting to see the roots of some of those seeds that have been planted. Now, it start to take shape. We’re seeing that on Casper. We’re extremely bullish about NFTs going forward. This is the calm before the next storm.
There’s a lot you shared there. As I’ve reflected on this word hype, the hype isn’t bad on its surface. There’s hype in fashion, eCommerce, and the entertainment industry, and hype can be good to a certain extent. We had an excess of hype, and it wasn’t necessarily done to the extent that people could keep their promises. When it’s all an experiment, we should call it experimental, caveat that hype a little bit more, and be a little bit more careful with our words because when you start going to a second and third degree of conversation, then it translates to media very differently than the intent of the original voice of the author.
It’s something we have all learned about choosing our words more carefully, thinking about more achievable milestones along the way, and not only going for the big rocks but the small ones. I also think it comes down to figuring out what utility matters the most. There’s an interesting utility around membership, gaming, rewards, and loyalty. These are things that can be done well. There are also some interesting enterprise use cases that we still haven’t even tapped into because it takes a little longer to develop but we saw early indications of that.
Roofstock** sold the first home on the blockchain using an NFT on OpenSea, and that was pretty incredible. They have done that several times now. They have been on the show. People have been talking about that for years. My last prediction before we move on since this is such a fun topic that we could go on for a while is there are going to be more hybrid economies where you’re mixing NFTs and other mechanisms including tokens and other things together to create more value like what ApeCoin has done in interacting with Mocaverse, for example, and things like that. Those are some of my thoughts.**
Joe, I’ll keep mine quick. I have two points that you mentioned. The first one is the hype cycle. When you look at the history of NFTs, NFTs haven’t been around for a very long time but they saw their first spotlight from 2021 to the end of 2022. It’s the first cycle. When you look at the first ICO boom when the rest of the market that wasn’t Bitcoin started to emerge, it had its first cycle. In ‘17 to ‘18, you saw this huge runup and then you saw 85% to 96% retracement over the next two years.
What are we seeing? Something similar in the NFT market. Not all cycles repeat but they rhyme. We’re seeing something like that. The products that survived that moment in the regular ICO boom that stuck around thrived in that next bull run that you saw from 2020 to 2022. The same thing is going to happen for the NFT projects that stuck around, found utilities, and found ways to make themselves useful in the future.
The second piece though is learning. There are a lot of lessons learned from that cycle into the next where those projects were able to have a lot of success. Those types of projects are doing that. In saying that, one of the things I wanted to bring up with Casper is that it has evolved in a lot of ways in offering secure and authenticated NFTs. Can you walk us through what has that journey been like? How do you think that’s going to help people thrive into this next cycle?
My role is to go back to that hype role. My job is to get as many people aware of what Casper is, what it can do for developers, and how developers and projects can use NFTs compared to other offerings and Layer 1s. We feel like we have a very unique offering as a Layer 1 public blockchain. From the Casper Association’s point of view, our role is to be a steward for the public blockchain, open up opportunities for developers, and make sure that there’s a strong open-source component to the work that’s being built for the public blockchain.
Casper Association: From the Casper Association’s point of view, our role is to be a steward for the public blockchain, open up opportunities for developers, and make sure that there’s a strong open-source component to the work that’s being built for the public blockchain.
However, we do have this symbiotic relationship with Casper Labs which is building a lot of the core infrastructure for the chain itself and is responsible for that but the unique thing here is that Casper offers a public, private, or hybrid infrastructure. The reason that’s interesting is because some of this adoption around NFTs and these use cases haven’t yet been executed well. For one reason or another, maybe the blockchain that is being used or enterprises look at other public blockchains like Ethereum.
The unique thing with Casper is the upgradeability aspect of it. We think that there’s this strong use case and differentiating factor with Casper. It’s not necessarily a new concept in blockchain but the way that we like to offer our NFT standard is to be able to be modular for a lot of use cases. When we talk about upgradeability for the enterprise application, enterprises to a large degree need to be compliant with a lot of regulatory bodies or whatever it may be but compliance is a big factor.
If you launch a smart contract on Ethereum, for example, that’s locked in. There are very limited ways to update information or the smart contract itself. The unique tools and toolset that Casper can offer to developers provide a wide range of flexibility for a wide range of use cases from the enterprise’s most rigorous demanding applications down to getting back to typical NFT projects where a small team can launch a 10,000 PFP collection in a much more efficient and secure manner on Casper.
From the genesis of where Casper has been, we’re building for the long-term and the future the rails and the infrastructure to get to the point where markets are ready to adopt this infrastructure. From a technical side, I would encourage developers to look at all of our developer documentation. My role is to make sure that those resources are available and that we’re offering something that is going to be future-proof and allow people to build using blockchain in a way that is efficient for them.
Let’s talk about that. What are some of the ways that businesses can utilize upgradable NFTs? That’s a pretty unique value-add that Casper brings to the table. I remember Medha talking about this quite a while back with the first NFTLA. It was a powerful moment for me to think about the fact that we don’t have to think about NFTs as rigidly as we once did. That’s for sure at this point. There are new standards being developed and a lot of creative hybrid use cases like we were talking about earlier but how can businesses utilize upgradable NFTs?
You brought up Medha Parlikar, CTO of Casper Labs. She’s a driving force. She has a very strong enterprise background. We have a number of materials out there where Medha is on video talking about going into a deep dive on those use cases for enterprise. The thing that strikes me and the obvious is the ability and the necessity to be flexible as an enterprise as businesses need to shift with whatever market dynamics they need to operate within.
Going back to regulatory compliance, this is a big factor for large enterprise clients where they want to put some data or information on the blockchain. Maybe a law has changed or something in their industry has changed, and they need to make adjustments to that code. With a modular infrastructure that Casper provides, they can do that in a secure manner without risk of damage to the data, security, privacy, or a lot of dynamic options. For enterprise use cases, the answer is this modularity, flexibility, and predictability when we’re talking about predictable gas fees, for example. These are all factors that come into play that aren’t necessarily decision factors for your average NFT collector. That would be one use case.
I appreciate the use cases. I’ve also had some conversations with Medha. She’s very articulate with all the different ways that you are creating for things to keep being built in a more efficient, protected, and secure way. Casper has been around for years. You’ve seen peaks, valleys, good, and bad. You are constantly building to improve and make things even better for your ecosystem. Can you walk us through what has that ecosystem maturity been like for Casper? What are some of the things you’ve been focusing on?
The blockchain itself or the mainnet didn’t go live until a few years ago. In that short period, it has been a constant upgrading of the protocol. The Casper Labs team has a very ambitious roadmap. We went through one of the biggest protocol upgrades since the mainnet launch. This was called the 1.5.2 upgrade. It is on par with some of the industry standard expectations that developers would look to in a blockchain to build on top of. We are a relatively new chain compared to Solana, Cardano, and Ethereum. However, our roots have come from this Ethereum ecosystem. Casper is derived from a technical term that came about that Vitalik coined as part of Ethereum as it was being built out.
Medha and Mrinal Manohar, CEO of Casper Labs, envisioned a blockchain that was very powerful for those enterprise use cases and envisioned a time when blockchain is going to be used for all kinds of things. The market at that time and even now has overlooked those demands and those requirements that large enterprise-facing clients will need in a blockchain to take advantage of that.
Casper Association: Medha and Mrinal Manohar, CEO of Casper Labs, envisioned a blockchain that was very powerful for those enterprise use cases and envisioned a time when blockchain is going to be used for all kinds of things.
That’s where Casper has positioned itself. Interestingly enough, that hardcore enterprise-grade level technology, rails, and infrastructure lends itself very well to some of the things that are less demanding. It offers a lot of efficiencies and unique ways of interacting with NFTs. In gaming, for example, we’re seeing a lot of potential around our NFT standard to take advantage of some gamified ecosystems.
What’s an example? What is one specific thing that you can do for a game better than anybody else?
This is one thing that I’ve been excited about as I’ve been called an NFT degen before. Anything that I see that could be interesting for the ongoing development of the NFT space, in general, excites me. Since I joined Casper years ago, there have been other exciting projects in other chains but I’ve always been confident that Casper has a unique toolset that’s going to be very powerful and useful.
If we’re talking about games, I’ll give you one example. A new standard is emerging on Ethereum. It’s called ERC-6551. It’s a way for NFTs to own NFTs. You have an account that owns and holds other assets or other NFTs. I’ll dumb it down for a bit because my understanding is dumb as well. An NFT can own an NFT, and that’s a very powerful thing if you’re thinking of characters inside of video games, for example, where your character owns a set of assets that are valuable in the game. You have a system where you can add all kinds of additional benefits and value to that existing digital asset that is probably yours.
On Ethereum, that’s another standard. On Casper, that comes native on chain with our CEP-78 standard where it’s multisig level control of the NFT, and you can have weighted key management. You have weighted management access to whatever that NFT represents if that NFT represents a deed to a high-value piece of real estate or if that NFT represents a whole host of NFTs that are collectively owned by this one asset. That can be anything. It’s up to your imagination.
When you start thinking about these digital things abstracting that away into physical ownership, you can start to imagine some new ways of interacting, new revenue streams opening up, and new business models opening up. That’s something super exciting for me, especially when we see some traction around Web3 gaming in general.
We see that macro trend taking off, and then we see the advantages that games, if they were launched on Casper, could have over other larger ecosystems on Ethereum. We’re super bullish and excited about telling that story and making sure that people understand the benefits if they’re going to be building. These are some powerful tools that unlock so many new opportunities. That’s something that I’m very passionate about. We’re excited about where that’s going.
This is a nice therapy session.
What’s your CryptoPunk’s coolest attribute?
It’s going to be an NFT.
It’s going to represent something.
Those are three amazing traits.
I picked up dinner for my kids.
Richard, we have a bonus question.
Your NFTs Are Actually—Finally—Totally Worthless. There’s a new report called **** from dappGambl.
We spent a lot of time trying to streamline our information for developers, users, and people, in general, looking more about blockchain and where Casper fits in along their journey down that blockchain rabbit hole. Casper.Network would be a good first starting point for people to deep dive down. We have links out there to connect on our newsletter, all of our socials, and developer resources. We launched a developer portal for developers. We will work on a lot of tutorials but the core landing page is Casper.Network.
Is there anything going on in Outlaw Dogs yet?
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