Casper Network (CSPR)

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Historical price evolution of Casper Network

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

Casper Network was born in the fourth quarter of 2018 when Mrinal Manohar, who holds a Master's in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and has experience at Bain & Company and Bain Capital in addition to having been a seed investor in Ethereum, MakerDAO and Filecoin, partnered with Medha Parlikar, who served as CTO and had held management positions at various software engineering companies, to co-found CasperLabs in Zug, Switzerland. The project adopted its name from the CBC Casper consensus framework designed by Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir.

During 2019, CasperLabs completed a Series A funding round for 14.5 million US dollars, with participation from investors such as Arrington XRP Capital and HashKey Capital. At this stage, Vlad Zamfir joined the team as principal architect of the consensus protocol, although he would subsequently leave the project.

On 30th March 2021, the mainnet launch of Casper Network took place alongside its CSPR token, becoming the first proof-of-stake blockchain in production built on the CBC Casper specification, implementing the Highway consensus protocol. In April of that same year, CSPR was traded through CoinList in what constituted the largest token sale in the platform's history up to that point. During 2021, Casper established collaboration agreements with IBM to develop interoperability between private Hyperledger Fabric networks and Casper's public mainnet, as well as with China's Blockchain-Based Service Network (BSN).

In September 2022, Casper integrated into Hyperledger, and in April 2023 joined the World Economic Forum's Global Innovator Programme. In May 2024, CasperLabs presented Prove AI, an artificial intelligence governance solution developed with IBM, during the IBM Think 2024 event.

A significant change occurred in October 2024 when CasperLabs AG was renamed as Prove AI AG and moved its main product to the Hedera network, formally disconnecting from Casper Network. The Casper Association announced a new interim council composed of Michael Steuer and Matt Schaffnit, which assumed control of the protocol before 1st December 2024, whilst the MAKE engineering team took over management of the protocol core development, a transition that had the public support of Mrinal Manohar.

In the most recent developments, Casper launched version 2.1.1 on testnet in December 2025, incorporating the burning of 100% of transaction fees and reducing block time from 16 to 8 seconds. In November 2025, Casper announced its alignment with the ISO 20022 international financial messaging standard. On 23rd March 2026, the mainnet hard fork to version 2.2.0 was implemented, called Kyoto Release, which included improvements in delegation management, adjustments to the validator set and WebAssembly runtime updates to achieve faster and more economical contracts. During the first quarter of 2026, the MAKE team recorded 47 updates.

Casper Network functions as a layer 1 blockchain based on Proof of Stake (PoS) that employs a consensus mechanism called Zug, derived from the CBC Casper (Correct-by-Construction) specification. This system improves upon traditional BFT protocols by allowing each block to be finalised within seconds and offering greater flexibility in expressing finality. The network selects up to 100 active validators per block through a periodic auction process, where participants must stake CSPR tokens proportionally to their desired participation. Users can delegate their tokens to these validators and receive a portion of the rewards generated by the validation process.

A distinctive feature of Casper is its ability to execute upgradeable smart contracts through WebAssembly (WASM). Unlike most blockchains, developers can modify already deployed contracts without losing the previous immutable history, a functionality especially useful for enterprise applications that require adaptation to regulatory changes. Contracts can be programmed in familiar languages such as Rust, Go, Python or JavaScript, which are subsequently compiled to WASM for execution on the network.

The native CSPR token fulfils multiple functions: payment of gas fees, participation in staking and on-chain governance. The network operates with an inflationary issuance model of approximately 8% annually to incentivise staking participation, but since version 2.1, all transaction fees are burnt completely, introducing deflationary pressure that partially counteracts the programmed inflation.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.