This Friday marks the roll out of our fourth piece to stake.link’s Meet the Nodes series. The protocol is committed to introducing and showcasing the member-node operators of stake.link, how they came to be, what they’re working on, why Chainlink, why stake.link, and what they envision a Chainlinked future looks like.
In this week’s Part Four of Meet the Nodes, we sat down with the Co-Founder and Chief Financial Officer of Chainlink node operator ChainLayer, Peter van Mourik.
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Q/Interviewer: It’s great to sit down with you Peter. Something that I found interesting about your background was your extensive work with established financial institutions and financial services firms in software and development roles. The Dutch Central Bank, Rabobank ICT, Robeco to name a few. That's quite the background, and on top of that, you’re referred to online as a blockchain veteran. What would you say got you into the space?
Peter: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think being in the financial industry for so long kind of drew me into this industry in a sense. When I was growing up, my dad used to work at the Rabobank as well, and banks used to be a place where people would be kind of proud to say that they worked at.
But somewhere over the course of the last 20 years, that changed a bit. We can all probably name one or two banks that have caused that sentiment, and that all happened right when I was working in the financial sector. So I think for me, the blockchain space is a space where we can rebuild finance in a new way and hopefully learn from the mistakes that were made in the past.
That said, looking back at 10 years of blockchain, I think a lot of the mistakes are already being made again, but it's definitely new people and it's still a young space, and I'm really excited in the fact that I think we still have a good shot at making a better financial ecosystem than the original, traditional finance.
As for crypto, it was in 2012 when I met Chris, the other Co-Founder of ChainLayer. We were both active on Bitcoin Talk, the famous Bitcoin forum, and it was kind of a real cowboy scene back then with projects popping up left and right. CPU mining just changed into FPGA mining. ASICs were being made by Butterfly Labs. The first scams were already around the corner. Back then, there was a company in Sweden called KNC that actually delivered pretty well on their promise of bitcoin mining equipment.
But we both were really into tech. We both liked the combination of the blockchain technology together with the actual hands-on requirements of having to drag miners up the stairs and power supplies. And I guess that really just drew us both in, that this is going to be something big. And I guess, we were right back then.
Q/Interviewer: You certainly weren't wrong, in 2012. That's almost as early as it can be for anybody in the financial world. How did you hear about bitcoin by 2012?
Peter: Actually, I think I heard about Bitcoin earlier. I remember that I spent some time in 2014 looking through all my old hard disks because I'm almost positive that I had been bitcoin mining with CPUs back in maybe as early as 2009. We never found them, unfortunately.
I think it’s still active; you had this tool called SETI@home a long while ago that was just searched for extraterrestrial intelligence with your CPU. So when your machine was idle, it would just make nice graphs and show you it was a brilliant screen saver, and you were looking for extraterrestrial intelligence at the same time. I think I downloaded bitcoin client as a similar thing, like, “Oh, you can download something, and it makes coins for you?” Yeah. How do you find these things? I don't know. It's just you and Google, and I read a lot.
Q/Interviewer: ChainLayer. You all are regarded as one of the highest performing, reputable Chainlink node operators in the Ecosystem. You guys are also working on a lot of fronts in the broader Web3 space: Validation, validator tooling development, even investing, supporting projects that you see can have a real-world impact. Talk a little bit about some of the work you guys do outside of Chainlink.
Peter: Yeah, our company was founded in July 2019. Before that, Chris and I just did some things outside of the company. I guess we started out as a PoS validator on Tezos. Tezos was the first major PoS network that launched around 2018, and PoS was kind of the thing that led us to making ChainLayer, because we realized that PoS networks were, well, much easier in terms of energy consumption compared to PoW networks. They also offered us and other people the opportunity to actually specialize in running networks for other people, for other projects. So, we started with Tezos, Cosmos followed soon after, and I think Terra and Iris to other networks based on Cosmos SDK.
Once you are tainted with a certain specialty, you kind of stick to it. So once projects know you as a high-performing validator, they tend to reach out to you to ask if you want to run another network as well. That's how we got into Solana and Celo, and I think today we're running about 20 networks as a validator. And on top of that, because of Chainlink and other networks that require RPCs, I think we run around 20 to 25 more networks just as RPCs for the normal network connectivity.
Q/Interviewer: It’s very admirable, how you're not just doing all this yourself, but set out to have an impact, especially focusing on PoS because of its energy efficiency, but you also want to invest in other companies, other startups that aim to have that same sort of impact. What would you say your core objectives, thesis is at ChainLayer?
Peter: I think blockchain projects will always require node operators or validators, and that's just something we’ve specialized in. We know how to run a blockchain project, and it doesn't matter if it's, for example, Cosmos based or Solana based, even if it's completely new. We kind of have all the in-house expertise to run any software that people need us to run, and I think we're at a point where we're able to run that software at a minimal total cost of ownership while keeping the quality of the software or running the quality of the DevOps as high as we can by automating as much as possible. Which at the same time is a challenge because release management from projects isn't the same quality everywhere, I'd say.
But yeah, we try to keep our automation at least as high as the release management of the projects.
Q/Interviewer: Yeah, and as impressive as the vast amount of work performed by ChainLayer is in PoS validation, this leads us to Chainlink, which is much different than validating new transactions in a blockchain network. What got you interested in Chainlink?
Peter: It’s a great question. I think in a sense, we were a bit lucky there. Well, we obviously heard about Chainlink during the initial token offering, and it always came across to us as a really promising project, but until we were actually asked by Chainlink to become a node operator, we weren't even aware that they were looking for node operators. So that again is, I think, a combination of doing the right things on the other projects that were working on, having a good name in the space, and being one of the first to be reached out to by Chainlink. Yeah, I think so far, we've at least proven our worth, which is kind of impressive to say the least.
Q/Interviewer: Why do you think it is that Chainlink is so popular in the Netherlands? We’ve noticed over the years a number of Dutch technical developers and even Chainlink community members.
Peter: It's not even Chainlink. I think the country as a whole has always been very “decentralized minded.” I guess there was a big ETH event last year in Amsterdam as well that was packed with people, and I was expecting a lot of non-Dutch people, but that wasn’t the case as much as I thought.
I think technology wise; we are a country that is on the forefront of a lot of things. So Dutch people are used to using technology in a lot of ways. A good example is banking. I think I remember around eight, nine years ago that we were already having this special computer that you could put your credit card in to generate a 2FA code to challenge the response code for your banking.
If you want to transfer money to show the bank that you were actually in front of your computer, while in the U.S., you would still have to drag a duck from left to right and enter a captcha to prove that it was you, which was no proof at all.
Those kinds of things are so logical for us, and even compared to other countries in Europe, Germany for example, even though they have a few nice things I’d say, I think that the Netherlands is still on the forefront of a lot of things.
Q/Interviewer: How do you envision Chainlink's role in the future of the blockchain industry?
Peter: I think it's stronger every day. The original problem that Chainlink solves is a serious problem, and Chainlink solves it really well and it has shown time and time again that not only is it a first mover but solving it in the way they solved it is something the market has a demand for, and that's just looking at the past.
When you then look at the things that have been released recently like Automation, well, more than recently, Automation, VRF, CCIP, I think Chainlink is just really well equipped to keep on solving actual problems that actual blockchain companies have. That might be the biggest advantage. I guess in a sense you could almost see them as a utility that a blockchain project can feel because they think of a use case that's not really there.
Chainlink so far has never come up with a problem that doesn’t need a solution – the use case is there, and time is a guarantee for success in my mind at least, and their ability to execute on it. In all honesty, I have said sometimes that things could go faster than they are, but then I think back about my long years at the banks and thinking, “They're doing a pretty good job.”
Q/Interviewer: It's not so slow then, right?
Peter: Right. And I think the slowness we do experience from time to time is probably, mainly because we want it all to go much faster. So, the combination of ability to execute with actually solving real world problems is in my mind the main reason it's going so well.
Q/Interviewer: Why did ChainLayer choose to become a member-node of stake.link, and what excites you about the protocol? What do you see in the future for stake.link?
Peter: I think first of all, it’s a privilege to be there. We’re very excited about the stake.link protocol.
I think we as a company and me personally are big fans of Liquid Staking. I think there's two camps: there's people in favor, there's people against, and there's not so many people in between. For me, Liquid Staking is about still securing a network with a certain value while keeping access to the liquidity of the underlying asset, and that's what stake.link solves, and that's exactly what we do. We put LINK in stake.link, and we keep the stLINK, and that's what we think it's meant for and that's the way we treat the platform. I think it has a lot of potential for other people to do the same.
If you look at Lido or Rocket Pool or any other staked ETH pools that are out there, you see a huge demand for liquid staked ETH, and it does no harm to the underlying security of Ethereum while at the same time giving people access to rewards on their stake with the ability to sell it whenever they want at a small premium. And there's a business case there for us, for the people using the Stake Link platform, and basically for everyone in the ecosystem.
So yeah, that's the main reason why we are excited about it. We're really happy that Chainlink is supporting it as much as they do as well.
Regarding the future here, I think the future depends a lot on the development of LINK staking itself, because we're only at a Staking version 0.1. v0.2 is coming end of year, but as far as I'm concerned, stake.link is best equipped to follow closely on the development of the actual staking itself, and making sure that any changes needed are made at the same time that a 0.2 or 0.5, or hopefully as 1.0 eventually becomes released in due time.
Yeah, I remember. It's kind of a funny sidestep here, but maybe not everybody knows I'm the same person that used to be the release manager on the Chainlink software. And I remember when I released the 1.0 version of Chainlink that made a lot of ruckus in the chain.
Q/Interviewer: I remember when that happened. People were losing their minds online when really, it was just the next number and could just as easily been version 0.9.10.
Peter: Yes, because before that happened, went from 0.9.0 all the way up to 0.9.16 I believe. And I was the person responsible for going from 0.9.9 to 0.9.10, which was unprecedented at that point, but that was just the next number.
Q/Interviewer: The ground felt like it was moving that day.
Peter: I think someone was actually checking the release page already. I think it was already out before it was out because I made a preliminary release on GitHub and someone saw that and posted it on Twitter or something. It was madness.
Q/Interviewer: If money was no object to you and your team, what would you build?
Peter: I love that question. One of the things, I think I touched on this before, is one of the reasons for me joining the blockchain space was because I still have a hope and an ambition that we're able to rebuild the financial world without making the same mistakes. One of the things that in TradFi, but also in regular company economics is sustainability and doing good for society and humankind.
That's something I noticed in the past months and years. Maybe that's not really happening as much as it should in the blockchain space. There's not so many companies saying, “We are working on becoming completely CO2 neutral.” We're not seeing companies giving grants to organizations that are helping people get scholarships in countries and things like that.
There are a few things happening here and there, but as a general industry, I think because it's so many small companies, there simply isn't a person in each company that thinks about the impact the companies can have on society, and that's something I've been thinking about a lot. So, if profitability was no object at all, I'd love to build out something that would help our company and other companies do good for their local communities, their states, their countries.
That makes it easier to do things, either directly for people that are in need of something, whether that's money or water or scholarships, or just to funnel money from a company to a charity that we know is good, that's doing things in a transparent way.
And I think doing that in a decentralized manner makes a lot of sense because the complaint I at least always hear about giving money to charities is that it's so intransparent that only a small part of the money actually ends up where you want it to end up. Yeah, that's something I'd love to either build or at least spend a lot of time on to find out if someone else is already building it and how we can work together.
Q/Interviewer: This has been a great sync, Peter. We like to end these conversations with the question if you care to share anything you and the team are working on that's special these days? Any cool alpha, anything the community might like? Anything that comes to mind?
Peter: I would actually say that it’s exactly what I talked about in my last answer. I wish I already had alpha right here right now.
I do intend to spend some time on it because I haven't heard about the sort of work with nonprofits and onchain transparency, and doing it in a decentralized, verifiable manner. So it’s something I’m going to start looking into.
I know Brian Armstrong already did something in that regard with Give ETH, but give something, where are you? Somewhere? GiveCrypto.org but that's a pretty big thing. So there are things, but, yeah, maybe a call out. If any of the readers of this eventual article know of any good things that would be worth me looking into, feel free to reach out to me and see if we can work together on that. You can reach me at peter@chainlayer.io
And maybe just a shameless shill of a project I really like is Lava.
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This concludes our fourth edition of the Meet the Nodes series. We’re privileged to work with node operators like ChainLayer and Peter, and we thank Peter for taking time out of his day to speak with us.
For more information on ChainLayer, please see the relevant links and documentation below:
About ChainLayer
We operate some of the most successful proof of stake networks in the world. We maintain the highest possible validation standards to achieve healthy consensus, fast, secure, and accurate oracle data.
At ChainLayer, we use a Zero Trust strategy - Never Trust, Always Verify. This strategy ensures that we can offer our services with the confidentiality, availability, and integrity required.
Our data centers are located in different countries and with various providers to ensure redundancy at all times.
We firmly believe that blockchain is the financial technology of the future. As early investors of emerging fintech, we currently support various projects that globally deliver sustainable, disruptive, and future-proof technology.
As investors and contributors, we are looking for projects with the potential for global adoption and the ability to execute.
Website: https://chainlayer.io
Telegram: http://t.me/chainlayer
Twitter:https://twitter.com/chainlayerio / @chainlayerio
Medium: https://medium.com/@chainlayer
About stake.link
stake.link is the first-of-its-kind liquid delegated staking platform delivering DeFi composability and Chainlink Staking. Built by premier Chainlink ecosystem developer LinkPool, powered by the top Chainlink node operators, and governed by the stake.link DAO, stake.link's extensible, pooled staking architecture is architected to support the vision of Chainlink Staking and to extend participation in the Chainlink Network.
Website: https://stake.link/
https://stake.link/Telegram: https://t.me/stakedotlink
Twitter: https://twitter.com/stakedotlink / @stakedotlink