Exclusive Interview with Ralf Kubli, Board Member at the Casper Association

The Casper Association is a Swiss-based not-for-profit company built around the Casper Network's broader community. In a nutshell, the company guides the Casper Network's ecosystem on matters of decentralization, blockchain adoption, and general development. Working together with the user base, the Association seeks to support and maintain the open-source resources throughout Casper Network's community. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Ralf Kubli, Board Member at the Casper Association.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that the company offers.

The Casper Association is a Swiss-based not-for-profit company built around the Casper Network's broader community. In a nutshell, we guide the Casper Network's ecosystem on matters of decentralization, blockchain adoption, and general development. Working together with the user base, the Association seeks to support and maintain the open-source resources throughout Casper Network's community.

Casper Association has a board that includes Patrick Storchenegger as the Chairman, along with me, Ralf Kubli, and Daniel Biesuz, as members. Also, we are delighted to welcome Mark Greenslade as the latest hire who will spearhead our Research team. Mark chairs the Swiss

Chapter for Decentralization of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He comes as a great addition to our tenure, given his experience in decentralization and blockchain technology as a whole. We also have a  team of experts, encompassing program management, distributed systems, and project management.

Comprehensively, among the Casper Association's key responsibilities is recruiting validators of the Casper Network as full members. After validators become members, they can then make decisions within the association while ensuring the Network's activities remain up to our high standard.

Nonetheless, our main goal is to create a highly scalable environment within the Casper Network, designed for developers, companies, and the community at large to create and deploy Decentralized Applications (dApps). We regularly organize events, such as hackathons, to enable the community to interact more directly with the Casper Network.

2. Kindly mention some of the major challenges the company has faced until now.

The essence of blockchain technology is in its security, efficiency, and transparency. Despite the new developments that this tech has brought to the world, these networks still struggle to factor in all actors and the system requirements for their ecosystem. The Casper Network runs as a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, and as such, it requires the utmost compliance when it comes to network validation.

Blockchain projects strive to optimize between being open, transparent networks while maintaining decentralization and security, and scalability.

3. Can you throw light on the latest employment trends in key sectors?

These days, Blockchain employment opportunities are no longer a new thing. According to a recent analysis tracked by the job searching platform LinkedIn, job postings with the word 'cryptocurrency' or 'blockchain' grew by almost 400% from 2020 to 2021. The trendiest titles in the job listings revolve around developers, marketing, community managers, product managers, and Chief Technology Officers. The salary caps on these jobs range from $70K to about $400K.

Those lucky enough to reside in countries where blockchain and Web3 are developing rapidly can see that blockchain technology is quickly breeding demand for new jobs, despite the relatively low adoption rate. Statistics recorded during the past year show that there was an over 100% spike in the number of people asking for jobs in the blockchain sector. Almost half of the number sought jobs that they would handle remotely. From this, it's clear that blockchain can provide employment opportunities for people who can work anywhere in the world from the comfort of their homes.

4. What role has Casper played in the innovations of new technologies?

The financial industry has anticipated that the adoption of blockchain technology would simplify traditional payment networks. However, at Casper, we believe the most important aspects of bringing innovation in finance to fruition.   The bond market claims over $128.3 Trillion in valuation, both corporate and government included. Through blockchain technology, tokenization of bonds has become a reality but is still in its infancy.

However, the tokenization of bonds hasn't been a fully exhausted sector, and there's more that blockchain trailblazers can do to make it more efficient. To address this, Casper has developed a new technology, what we have termed smart financial contracts. Smart financial contracts enable issuers to execute the whole process of issuing bonds and underlying cash flow directly into an on-chain system that is machine-executable. Since the loan parameters are hardcoded within the contract, the smart financial contract will handle the calculation of interest, leaving no need for intermediaries.

5. Where do you see growth coming in for the blockchain sector?

Non-fungible tokens have contributed tremendously to the overall market value of crypto and user adoption. Throughout 2021, NFT sales garnered about $22 billion. During the third quarter alone, NFT sales came in at $10.7B. In a recent 20-country survey, analysts found that around 32%of respondents indicated they already owned at least one NFT. Such values signal a possible uptrend of believing that NFTs are the next big thing. Even Sotheby's pop culture Director Cassandra Hatton has revealed that the interest in NFTs is filling up her inbox.

Meta's Reality Labs section, what we all knew formerly as Facebook, has now invested over $10B in the Metaverse. It almost goes without saying that in the next five years, tens of thousands of jobs could come out of the Metaverse. To give some concept of potential scope, the Metaverse as a whole was estimated to be worth $46 billion, even in 2020.

The age of NFTs also carries with it some risks, which is not unexpected, as every new piece of technology has to pass through some failures. Take, for instance, Openseas' recent revelation stating that about 80% of NFTs in markets are either scam baits, spams, or just blatant fraud. I believe we all agree that copyright infringement stands as the worst fear among artists in the world of virtual forms of art. Therefore, we are working on solutions that will reinstate the confidence of artists to come back to NFTs.

Additionally, the Casper Association acknowledges that security is essential when it comes to digital art. We are building secure environments, delivered from NFT solutions startup VERITIC, to create a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). Our main goal is that the Casper community can mint NFTs safely and securely for global mass adoption. In a nutshell, we are allowing the art community an opportunity to create unique and innovative pieces while being able to prove that they originated from actual sources.