Why CasperLabs: Omer Ozden (RockTree Capital)
Why CasperLabs
At CasperLabs we’re on a mission to explore blockchain’s next frontier. We’re building a platform that pulls all the pieces together — one that paves the way for a new era of equitable innovation. As we’ve progressed through milestone after milestone, we wanted to take some time to highlight the support behind our project and take a moment to share with the community the rationale behind the support. In this special Why CasperLabs series, you will be hearing from a circle of luminaries, innovators, and leaders on why they have joined us on the journey to help blockchain deliver real solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.
Omer Ozden
For the second edition of our Why CasperLabs series, we would like to introduce our community to Omer Ozden, Chairman & CEO of RockTree Capital. Omer has been at the forefront of pioneering transactions between China and the United States for over two decades, working with major companies like New Oriental, NetEase, Baidu, Alibaba, UrWork, Beijing Capital, Xinyuan and ZhenFund. He has additionally worked with major groups in the U.S. such as Sam Zell (the largest individual real estate investor in the United States and inventor of the REIT), JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Baker & McKenzie, and Morrison & Foerster. Hear Omer’s take on the CasperLabs team and how the focus on security and scalability is the key to progress:
Full Transcript Below:
Hello everybody! I’m Omer Ozden, CEO of RockTree Capital. We’re a merchant bank investor and advisor to the best blockchain projects in greater China and North America. We’re a founding investor into CasperLabs and also an advisor. I want to tell you why we invested into this project.
For us, a part of our investment theme is to focus on the team and we are very impressed with the CasperLabs team. We spent time with them in California, New York, Canada, and Asia. On the technical side we’re very impressed by the leadership of Medha Parlikar, as well as Michael Birch and Daniel Kane, who are able to bring together the mathematical proof of Vlad Zamfir’s CBC Casper protocol.
For us as investors, it’s also vital that the business side and the business leadership of a project is also high quality. I’ve been particularly impressed by CEO Mrinal Manohar’s confluence of bringing both his technical skill and his background in finance into this project, especially in terms of enterprise uptake and token economics. Additionally, an understanding of business and finance is critical, and CasperLabs also has Scott Walker who has taken layer one projects and made them successful in the past, and Cliff Sarkin, who has a finance and law background.
One of our other investment themes in China is what we call “Wall Street 2.0.” I’m typically in our Beijing office, but today I’m here in New York and behind me is our neighbor, the Federal Reserve. I want to talk to you about what we see as the initial transformation and adoption of blockchain, especially as finance moves from paper-based to digital-based. This will also flow through enterprise, as many of you know as well.
The limiting factor thus far from our view is not the applications building upon blockchain, but actually the layer one protocols, where security and scalability are so critical. What CasperLabs solves is that it brings CBC Casper and pure PoS layer one protocol to fruition to allow Wall Street to move from Wall Street 1.0, as we’ve been having for the past 120 years, to Wall Street 2.0. We look forward to the release of the CasperLabs TestNet very soon and the upcoming MainNet later on in the year.
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