Vlad Zamfir is joining a VC-backed startup racing to launch the Casper upgrade ahead of Ethereum

Business•January 14, 2019, 2:43PM EST
UPDATED: July 17, 2019, 7:19PM EDT
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Vlad Zamfir is joining a VC-backed startup racing to launch the Casper upgrade ahead of Ethereum
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Quick Take

  • Vlad Zamfir, Ethereum’s star researcher, is joining a startup vying to be the first to deliver the Casper protocol upgrade
  • The aptly-named firm, Casper Labs, has raised $20M in funding led by Galaxy. It elected Scott Walker, the President of DNA investment fund, as its chairman and crypto-veteran Steven Nerayoff as its vice

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Vlad Zamfir, one of Ethereum's lead researchers, is stepping back from the blockchain empire to collaborate with Casper Labs, an R&D startup building a "fully scalable blockchain", The Block can confirm.

Casper Labs will be an indirect competitor to Ethereum as it endeavours to deliver the much-anticipated Casper protocol upgrade. Zamfir was leading a popular version of Casper (CBC) at Ethereum, helping the network to rely on stake rather than computing power to achieve consensus, as well as addressing scalability issues. 

But while Ethereum's deadline for the CBC upgrade is not for another few years, Casper Labs is focused on offering the upgrade as soon as possible - offering Zamfir a fresh, more focused platform.

"Ethereum is a project that is already up and running. It's always harder to upgrade like that; it's like changing a car engine when it's running, it's a lot more complicated," Casper Labs' CEO, Mrinal Manohar, told The Block. "Vlad just wants the world to switch to proof of stake. He's still very supportive of Ethereum because they're working on Casper [the protocol]. But we have a dev team that's solely focused on accelerating it." 

Manohar said that Zamfir has so far signed an IP licensing agreement and a letter-of-intent with Casper Labs, while a final contract is pending. Casper Labs will be Zamfir's main financer but he will not be an employee, the company said, and all of his research will remain fully open-source.

"Casper Labs is making a multi-year, multi-million dollar commitment to continue to fund Zamfir's research into CBC Casper," the company said. "We are very supportive of any project using [Vlad's work on Casper]. We will have a fully public GitHub and fully public research materials," added Manohar. "We're not trying to bootstrap the research. Obviously, we're hoping to bring it to market first, but we're not believers in exclusivity."

Manohar clarified that the Ethereum Foundation is not a direct investor in Casper Labs, but will continue to partially fund Zamfir's work.

Casper Labs

The blockchain start-up, set to officially launch next month, has so far received verbal commitments of $20M in its ongoing Series A round, backed by top-funds like Galaxy and BlockTower. In addition, C-level executives have committed personal funds, including its chairman Scott Walker, who is also the President of DNA, a major crypto investment firm.

"We're burning 300k a month. We've spent a little over a million already. We're all paying for it personally," Manohar said.

Although Casper Labs is up against time - and by extension, Ethereum - its founders say they want to contribute to the wider blockchain sphere. "There are research components that a lot of blockchains share in common," Manohar said.

Meanwhile, Walker added that he had invested in a wide range of projects as well as Casper Labs.

"I believe the winning blockchain will have a value in the hundreds of billions of dollars. We have no idea what the winning blockchain [or protocol]  is...I love Ethereum, I love Bitcoin. I've made additional investments in literally a dozen other protocols [including EOS]. But I've always believed in Vlad, and I'm hoping to help Casper Labs as much as I can," he said. 

Vlad Zamfir

Zamfir first discovered Ethereum in early 2014. He attended various meetups alongside core developers like Vitalik Buterin and Charles Hoskinson. They subsequently invited Zamfir to join the Ethereum Foundation's development team in April of that year during its inaugural intake, alongside co-founders Vitalik and Gavin Wood.

While initially skeptical of proof-of-stake (PoS) as a consensus algorithm, Zamfir eventually adopted the idea after speaking with Ethan Buchman, an Ethereum developer at the time, one evening. "I connected the dots and internalized the power of security deposits for proof-of-stake. This was the night that I became convinced that PoS would work, and that making it work would be a huge amount of fun,” Zamfir wrote in a Medium post.

Zamfir proposed the Casper upgrade in August 2015, foreseeing a proof-of-stake implementation that would “allow for faster block times than is possible with proof-of-work consensus.”

He is known as an opensource purist, with his Ethereum IP publicly available. The move to Casper Labs could mean he focuses less on formalizing Ethereum's governance process and more on boosting its security. Zamfir is also rumoured to be resigning from the board at RChain, which The Block reported to have fallen into financial difficulties last month.

Zamfir could not be reached for comment.


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