Casey Kuhlman is an American lawyer and developer who co-founded Eris Industries (later renamed Monax) alongside Preston Byrne. Eris was one of the first companies built on Ethereum technology, developing tools for permissioned smart contract systems.
Background
Before entering the blockchain space, Casey ran a small law firm headquartered in Somaliland (a self-declared independent state in northern Somalia), where he lived for approximately six years. His practice focused on law building, corporate governance, compliance, and corporate transactions. His wife worked at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and they split time between Somaliland and the Netherlands.
Casey's interest in blockchain technology began in 2013 when the main money transmitter company in the Somali region faced the threat of losing its UK bank account with Barclays due to compliance concerns. This led him to research blockchain's potential for reducing remittance costs, and eventually to Ethereum.
Early Ethereum Involvement
Casey attended the Ethereum Amsterdam meetup in early 2014, where he gave a talk on legal approaches to smart contract development. As a "lawyer-coder" — someone who understood both contract law and programming — he offered a unique perspective on how smart contracts related to traditional legal systems.
He blogged extensively about "virtual automatic contracts" (his preferred term for smart contracts), writing about their potential applications in developing countries, humanitarian relief, and governance systems.
Eris Industries / Monax
Casey co-founded Eris Industries with Preston Byrne, building one of the earliest platforms for deploying permissioned blockchain applications using Ethereum-compatible smart contracts. Eris Industries was noted by Viktor Trón as being one of the first Ethereum-related "brands":
"I mean I think at the time it was only Eris Industries… who later became Monax, this marmot thingy and they did some nice work by the way."
The company later rebranded to Monax and focused on enterprise blockchain tooling.