Casper CTO says interoperability has concentrated crypto’s power in a few intermediaries

Michael Steuer, president and chief technology officer of Casper Network, said moving value across blockchains is now largely mediated by a small group of centralized intermediaries, undermining crypto’s long-standing claims of decentralization. Steuer framed this dynamic as a structural outcome of the industry’s approach to interoperability and user experience, drawing on a background in mobile gaming, enterprise software and early blockchain development.

He said moving value across chains forces investors to understand how bridges work or to rely on centralized players that reintroduce risks crypto was designed to remove, and that interoperability has been pushed into the hands of a few intermediaries. Bridges have become the default path for cross-chain transfers, holding large pools of locked assets and repeatedly being targeted by hackers, which has produced some of crypto’s largest losses; chain hopping via bridges has also become a money-laundering method, the article said.

At the infrastructure level, messaging and verification systems mediate cross-chain communication and authorize which cross-chain messages are recognized by destination contracts. Steuer said interoperability is “effectively centrally controlled by a handful of players like Chainlink, LayerZero and Axelar,” and that concentration limits who can participate by creating chokepoints outside the control of underlying networks.

Key Topics

Crypto, Casper Network, Michael Steuer, Chainlink, Layerzero, Axelar