Crypto’s Decentralization Will Break Through Functionality: Casper CTO

Transferring value on blockchains is currently mostly mediated by a small group of centralized intermediaries, despite crypto's longstanding claims of decentralization.

Michael Steuer, president and chief technology officer of Casper Networks, describes this shift in industry practices and user experience as structural results.

With a background that spans mobile gaming, enterprise software, and early blockchain development, Steuer questions the industry's communication problem of how real users interact with technology.

“For some reason, in crypto it is perfectly acceptable to ask users to worry about things that they would never think about in the real world,” he told Cointelegraph.

Moving value through the chain requires investors to understand how bridges work or to rely on central players, which are integrated to avoid crypto reintroducing risk, Steuer said. As a result, interaction is placed in the hands of a few intermediaries.

Crypto ideology UX failure

For most users, interacting with crypto requires an understanding of infrastructure that is still invisible in any consumer technology.

Moving prices often means choosing a network, checking wallet compatibility, checking bridge support, and accounting for fees and delays along the way.

Sturr says that expectation has become commonplace as the industry has grown around early adopters willing to deal with conflict.

“We have to think about what's acceptable to the early adopters and what's acceptable to your mom, dad, and your neighbor,” Steuer said.

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With traditional payment systems, users make simple choices, such as paying by cash or card, while transfers and settlements are handled in the background. The consumer does not decide how a transaction moves between banks or networks, and most errors can be reversed.

The stakes in crypto are high. Major exchanges warn that assets sent on the wrong network — such as sending tokens on Solana instead of Ethereum — can be permanently lost.

Bridges are often the default way when assets need to move between blockchains. Those bridges evolved into critical infrastructure for functionality, putting a smaller number of intermediaries at the center of how value moves across the blockchain.

Bridges are among the weakest parts of the crypto stack because they hold large pools of locked assets. Cross-chain bridges have been frequently targeted by hackers, leading to some of the biggest losses in crypt history. Chain-linking through bridges has become an increasingly common method of money laundering by threat actors.

Centralized gatekeepers manage interactions with each other.

Bridges act as user-facing communication layers that mediate cross-chain communication between infrastructure-level messaging and authentication systems. Some method still needs to determine whether a chain transfer or message is valid and sufficiently complete before it can be applied to the destination network.

These systems typically do not hold properties, but allow which cross-chain messages are recognized by destination contracts and are eligible to execute.

“Currently, interoperability is effectively controlled by a few players like Chainlink, LayerZero and Axelar,” said Steyer. “They build and deploy their own cross-chain interfaces, decide which protocols are enabled and ultimately gatekeeper who has access and who doesn't.”

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Stier says the issue is not that these systems exist, but that they are becoming inevitable. As a small number of providers control how blockchains communicate, interoperability begins to resemble centralized blockchains.

This concentration limits who can participate, making cross-chain activity dependent on infrastructures that operate outside the control of the networks themselves.

At the same time, the focus is partly the result of technical reality. Blockchains operate under different security assumptions, consensus models, and execution environments, making native interoperability difficult to implement.

To solve that coordination problem, messaging and authentication layers emerged, providing a common mechanism for authenticating cross-chain events in the absence of shared standards.

Crypto fragmentation and centralized interactions fuel ethnic nationalism.

The consequences of fragmented interaction extend beyond infrastructure to culture.

Loyalty to certain chains boils down to identity when users are forced to worry about which network they're on, which wallet they're using, and which devices are backing up their assets.

“You see this with the XRP army, with the Bitcoin maximalists, with the Ethereum crowd,” Stier said. “Such tribalism doesn't happen because users want it. It happens because the system forces people to vote.”

Networks compete not as a closed ecosystem but as a wider system of interchangeable components.

Stier says this clan mentality is the result of users committing to certain networks to fully participate. Once assets, applications and communities are locked into different chains, interoperability becomes a competitive tool.

This flexibility makes it difficult to design a universally functional infrastructure, he said. Protocols are encouraged to maintain their own ecosystems rather than reduce conflicts between them, and in doing so benefit users.

Blockchains, he says, will continue to multiply the fragmentation that the industry plans to remove until they allow users to interact without exposing them to networks, wallets and bridges. Today, decentralization exists at the protocol level, but coordination, utilization, and power are concentrated elsewhere, while simultaneously reinforcing centralized infrastructure and tribal divisions.

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