Hi Reddit! I’m Michael. In the late nineties, I rolled out one of the first and the largest decentralized payment network in existence at the time, by connecting over 100 mobile operators across Europe to a single billing interface - enabling enterprises to charge mobile phone users no matter which network they connected to. In the early 2000s, I led mobile game development at THQ, where we built the first downloadable phone games, heralding the app economy that still thrives today. Back then, the world was still figuring out whether people would even want to do these things.
Today, I’m President and CTO of Casper, and I feel similarly about what we’re building. I think that over the next five to ten years, some of this technology will make everyday life easier without you necessarily noticing it’s there.
If “blockchain” makes you think mostly of crypto, I get it. That’s where the noise is. But a lot is happening underneath it. At Casper, one of the things we’re working on is tokenization: making it possible to represent assets, such as a property or a stake in a business, as digital tokens people can own and trade. What excites me is opening up markets where participating has often required a lot of money or the right connections. You shouldn’t have to afford an entire building to own a small part of it, and selling your share should be simpler than it is today.
We’re also working on payments for AI agents. If you ask an agent to do a job, it can still get stuck when it needs to pay for information or a service. Giving it a way to make small payments within a budget you set might sound like a minor feature, but it could let your agent finish much more of the work without handing it back to you. And if you sell something online, an AI agent could become your customer, too.
These are two areas I spend a lot of time thinking about and building for. You don’t need to know anything about crypto (or be interested in it) to join the conversation. Ask me anything!
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