How CasperLabs token may take a bite out of high gas fees – CasperLabs, a new smart contract blockchain network, announces its CSPR token sale — which CTO Medha Parlikar likens to a ‘gas futures market.’

CasperLabs, a new layer-1 smart contract network that recently joined China’s nationwide blockchain network, announced today that its CSPR token will be open for sale from March 23 to 26 to non-U.S. “accredited investors.”

The token sale will take place on San Francisco-based platform CoinList — a project launched out of a partnership between Protocol Labs and AngelList.

“U.S. investors… will not be able to participate in the public sale unfortunately,” CasperLabs CTO Medha Parlikar told Forkast.News in a video interview. “We are looking to building a sustainable business and we believe in decentralized technology, but we also believe in compliance.”

Casper network is an enterprise-focused layer-1 proof-of-stake blockchain protocol aiming to solve the issues of scalability, security and decentralization that have plagued other smart contract blockchains such as Ethereum. Although Ethereum has launched Ethereum 2.0 in hopes of solving some of these problems, users still complain about Ethereum’s high transaction fees — also known as “gas fees.” Ethereum’s gas fee issues could worsen with the growth of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), most of which continue to rely on Ethereum.

Read also: Nigeria plans for blockchain adoption, to generate $10 billion by 2030

See related article: Ethereum’s big transformation arrives with launch of Ethereum 2.0

To tackle the problem of high transaction fees, Casper is introducing a “gas futures market” concept, Parlikar said. By tokenizing block space to allow companies to buy future block space, Casper’s gas model aims to allow its blockchain’s users to lock in prices now, to have more predictable future network usage costs.

“Enterprises do budgeting at about every half a year, so about six months,” Parlikar said. “[By] providing enterprises a six-month window, they’re going to have a pretty good sense of what their network usage is going to look like.”

CasperLabs, which recently joined China’s nationwide, government-led Blockchain Service Network (BSN), has also been attracting interest from enterprise users outside of China for its chain of custody services and ability to mitigate counterfeits by authenticating products, the network’s CEO Mrinal Manohar told Forkast.News in an earlier interview.

While blockchain is already a national priority for public and private sectors in China, Western banks and institutions such as JP Morgan and Bank of New York Mellon are just now warming up to blockchain in financial services. As such, centralized finance (CeFi) players may have to view the incorporation of blockchain technology favorably to streamline and modernize operations, which still relies on COBOL (common business-oriented language). COBOL, the programming language that is 60 years old, is being used by 43% of banking systems and 80% of in-person transactions, according to Reuters.

See related article: How Swiss banks seek to link traditional finance to blockchain

“They [CeFi] see the writing on the wall, they’re not dummies,” Parlikar said. “They’re going to increment their way, starting with risk reduction, and over the next three to seven years they will start implementing more public-facing products using blockchain technology.”

Watch Parlikar’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about how Casper networks looks to interoperate with existing protocols while proposing alternatives to gas models and governance.

Highlights

• Only non-U.S. accredited investors can participate in CSPR public token sale: “U.S. investors… will not be able to participate in the public sale, unfortunately. We are bound by the regulatory environment in the United States and we are doing our very best to remain as compliant as possible. Even our private token sale was a Reg. D token sale, so only accredited investors were allowed to participate.”

• Is the Casper blockchain an “Ethereum killer”?: “We think that the playing field is still very much wide open, so we don’t really see ourselves as an ‘Ethereum killer’ or a ‘Cardano killer’ or a ‘NEAR killer,’ or any of those protocol killers. We think that the space is still very, very much open. And each of those protocols bring a unique use case or value proposition to their customers, their enterprise customers. We believe that our value proposition is similarly very unique.”

• How enterprises will adopt blockchain: “The way I see enterprise adopting blockchain is blockchain as part of a larger application architecture. Enterprises are going to take one tiny value proposition — one tiny piece of their larger system architecture — and they’re going to implement or pilot a piece of that against blockchain. And if they’re going to do that, that blockchain has got to work with all of their existing delivery mechanisms, and none of the blockchain in the space right now have thought about that.”

• How users can predict their future gas prices in the Casper network: “What we are going to essentially do is we’re going to tokenized block space. So when you tokenized block space, you’re able to purchase space in a future block. And so this in essence creates what we’re calling a gas futures market.”

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