stakefish – From Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake

Brian: Chun, thanks much for joining us today, where are you calling in from?

Chun Wang: Yeah, I’m from Longyearbyen, it’s an arctic island, and the weather is great, and a great view outside and we have about 24 hours of sun and it’s wonderful living here. 

Brian:  I was reading and hearing that you’re traveling across the world and have been doing for a while, but are you now settled in this Arctic island up there?

Chun Wang: I’m trying to settle everywhere, but this is quite a strong preference if I settle down, I probably consider settling down here.

Brian: What attracts you to this? I’ve never heard anyone say, I would really like to settle down on some tiny remote island in the Arctic. 

Chun Wang: Yeah, that’s the second best place on the earth, and only after Antarctica because a few countries started in the 1960s and the future forbids people living in Antarctica, that makes it the best practical place if you value political neutrality usually, you should definitely try it out.

Brian: But it’s not its own country, you said it was part of Norway?

Chun Wang: Yeah, it’s part of Norway, but there’s a trading system signed 1925, which allows people from other nationalities, they must be treated the same as Norwegians, you don’t need a visa, you don’t need a work visa, just come and you can do like local Norwegians, I must say there are no local people here because it’s not allowed to get born here, everyone’s coming from elsewhere.

Brian: And then how many people live up there? 

Chun Wang: Here in town more than 2000 people, maybe 2,500. 

Brian: It’s like a tiny bunch of sort of eccentric people who ended up there, what kind of people are staying there?

Chun Wang: It’s not tiny anymore, it’s more than two thousand people, I went for a walk in a town yesterday where Russians and Ukrainians live peacefully together, that town has a little bit more than 200 people and it’s about 50 kilometers away from here, compared to that Longyearbyen is quite big. 

Brian: I kind of want to come back to something, related later in the episode, because you talked about space travel, but let’s go back and start a little bit in beginning, you’ve been involved in crypto for a long time.

Can you tell us what inspired you initially? How did you get involved in the crypto space?

Chun Wang: Initially I was a contributor to SETI at home, which was using radio telescopes to collect, signals, trying to find aliens from signals received by radio telescopes.

And by doing that, you contribute to your computing core from your personal computer’s spare time, and one day I read about Bitcoin from slashdot and I learned about it using one night and I left on my laptop running Bitcoin footnote trying to mine something out, but the second morning throughout the zero on my wallet, so I went to a local market to grab tools and GPUs.

That was in 2011 since then I never stop, technically the miner, but I only personally mine Bitcoin, in the first two years personally used GPUs later at fp3a6, I stopped mininb myself in 2013 but started mining pool and people contributed to mining powers. The mining pool, basically I’m running the server side, it depends on how you define Bitcoin mining if you are using a strict definition, I’m no longer a miner.

Brian: What was your kind of idea, what was your vision for F2pool? Where did you wanna take it? 

Chun Wang: I think, just to say the latest development, we all know, it’s gonna change to PoS pretty soon, we don’t know when, but I think as a matter of months, after that we’ll only see how many coins we have currently, Actually we have a 20 different coins, but there are a very few innovations on the developing the PoW side, I think after ETH become a PoS basically where F2Pool become a Bitcoin company. If I foresee anything, we’ll almost become a pure Bitcoin company in the next year. 

Brian: Now that you’ve been involved in PoS as well as proof-of-work, I’m curious, when you compare, PoW and mining proof versus the PoS of validators, what are the biggest differences between those two?

Chun Wang: To me actually it’s quite similar, but a lot of other team members, probably have another idea, but to me, it’s very like the same thing, just secure blockchain, create a new block, especially on ETH, become currently it’s running PoW and the f2pool take the ability to secure user network and later ETH become PoS, it’s Stakefish in charge of this.

What we are doing to F2pool and Stakefish is very similar and kind of the same thing. 

Brian: There are obviously differences, what do you think are the most important differences, sort of in terms of running it as a company?

Chun Wang: A difference, I think that’s a little bit much into the details, how you handle miners, how you handle incoming hash rate, how you handle validators, miners you at least where they from because you have the IP address, but Stakefish, you have absolutely no idea who your stakers are.

In terms of product design, for sure there are some differences, for me, I try to see them as similar, I try to see what similarities they share rather than the differences from each other. There probably is some chance later you see, it’s too common maybe they work very closely together. 

Brian: I think that is the big similarity, you’re checking transactions, producing a block, securing the chain, there’s a lot of those similarities but I’m kind of like.

Chun Wang: You connect to another p2p network, and then you join the governance. 

Brian: Let’s talk about Stakefish, I used to be part of the Tendermint team, and then I started Chorus One, I was part of the game of stakes back then, original Cosmos test net, and Stakefish was like very active in there. It was doing an excellent job and I could tell that these people already have come with a whole bunch of experience that I think others didn’t have.

But tell us a little bit, how did you start Stakefish?

Chun Wang: I must say it was pretty much by Eastern people back then, when they signing PoS, that was 2017. The pool had been operated since 2013 and we are a two-person business, my partner takes care of our concern, support, miner relationship, kind of talk to miners and I just run the servers.

Two-person business until 2016, we have a third guy joining us in October 2016, and since then we started to consider making a two-person small business a real company, we started to hire people in 2017, and in mid-2017, we have about 10 people working in a small office.

In the beginning I didn’t want to do this in China, but the other two people have a pretty strong preference, I already moved to Thailand in 2015 and I rarely visit the office in Beijing, one day my partner told me that we are going to move to a bigger office because there are too many people there, and his wife says let’s just move the office to a secret place without telling me.

So that’s what happened and I started to feel like, I don’t have to spend that much time, handling everyday payouts, maintain the servers. So I started to think about something else, the second half of 2017, I gave myself kind of a vacation of a few months, and that’s also a time Bitcoin become Bitcoin gold, this and that.

And I was thinking, what’s next? I got some talks with different people and a lot of them sent me, staking pool, I started to think about something staking-related, but meanwhile, I got a new domain name, my partner at F2pool, just a secure domain name that you wanted for long and maybe you can do something using this domain.

So I didn’t know what to do with that domain, I haven’t got a domain name to find some good use of it, that was bit.fish and we started something, it’s bit.fish and in Bangkok we got an office, and even though I didn’t know what to do, how much maybe 10 million Thai-Baht just to decorate the office.

So, fortunately, we got a few interesting people to join us in the beginning, that’s how Stakefish, we only figured out to do staking and rename it from Bitfish to Stakefish, later I think in 2019, that’s how we started because I think mostly we started from nothing.

Just go through this, doing something, but now we know Stakefish. I think that also has a lot of compliments, what I used to do with Bitcoin, doing mining and Stakefish is kind of doing similar things to ETH and the PoW combined with PoS, we kind of secure the BTC infrastructures with good things.

I think that’s super important to the ecosystem because there are gonna be eventually someone to talk to the p2p network to create a new block, and without people doing this blockchains just simply stuck, we got developers they write footnote, but our role is mostly DevOps, we run infrastructures, to make a system going don’t just need developers, also need people to maintain the infrastructure. 

Brian: And then, you guys were working on the Cosmos test net, was that your first network where you guys went live? 

Chun Wang: Yes, Cosmos was the first network because they were kind of early in the staking and this fact that people talking about Ethereum these days. But we still have no idea when Serym becomes pure as when it’s getting merged. 

Brian: I’m curious about Ethereum, a lot of people right? In the last years, we’ve had a lot of other layer ones come up, we had Solana, Cosmos, maybe many layer ones depending on how we look at it, Polkadot, Near and many others, now you seem to be very Ethereum focused.

Chun Wang: I’m Bitcoin-focused. 

Brian: You’re Bitcoin-focused, I listened to this interview done with the Staking Voice guys, and in there you basically were like, oh, once Ethereum switches to your PoS, that’s the most important thing.

What do you think about that? What do you think about the role of Ethereum and the competition from other layer-ones? 

Chun Wang: I think Ethereum still has the best team, to be honest, and what you mentioned previously, at least in a short time, is probably no one can try this certain position.

Also, when people talk of flips, I don’t think Ethereum can challenge Bitcoin’s in terms of valuation. But I think there’s no chance it can handle Bitcoin in terms of decentralization and in terms of the people accept.

You might see, what you mentioned Solana, Near, to me it’s similar to investing in a new startup company, but investing in Bitcoin is investing in freedom in the future and that has a fundamental difference.

Brian: When you talk about the decentralization of Bitcoin versus Ethereum what do you think are the things that make Bitcoin fundamentally more decentralized?

Chun Wang: It’s because of how they work, Ethereum is kind of this package that’s much better compared to a few years ago, they still have centralized planning, decision making, and how everything’s organized.

Brian: I guess you’re wearing the UASF hat, now probably most listeners will not remember this because this was many years ago, but this stands for the user-activated soft fork, which was the big debate in Bitcoin where some people wanted to increase the block size.

And they were like, okay look, we need more throughput, we need more space, and others were basically against this, and I think, well there’s a lot of different arguments used. 

Chun Wang: We have another debate going on, and rather than USAF people started to talk about URSF and that’s the opposite side to USAF but, I think the philosophy is kind of similar.

Brian: When you think about the future of proof-of-stake, do you think proof for stake is kind of pretty established in how it works or do you think we are gonna see a lot of changes in innovation and new types of staking mechanisms and protocols? 

Chun Wang: Yeah, for sure, but once again, I think all these startup companies, there are a hundred, maybe a thousand reasons a startup company goes wrong. Such like what you see what happened to Solana, I think there was some, a lot of headaches to keep the network going. I think they have a chance to get the problem fixed, but as I mentioned, you must see an altcoin in smaller coin, just as a universal startup company.

For sure, if you do it right, you can get a reward maybe a hundred times, 1000 times, versus things could go wrong and there there’s 1000 reasons things will go wrong.

Brian: When you think of the future of proof of stake, what are the kind of dimension in which things will change?

Chun Wang: I think for the state, we probably have two kinds of systems going on simultaneously. One is we’ll keep running validators, we’ll keep drawing the governance in good things, and we’ll operate as many networks, good reputation ones as possible. And I would say, just to check our portfolio, our website and you can safely say, you buy every coin we listed on Stakefish, and you can expect good profit, good reward, and that’s what we are doing.

Trying to support all the good, reputable and good innovative coins in the PoS world. Actually we were doing a similar F2pool for PoW as well, but unfortunately, there’s not much innovation this days in the PoW world, we keep the existing coins in F2pool, currently, we still have 21 coins, included mining ones.

But I think maybe, they’re remotely listing new ones, PoS still have a lot of innovations. I’m not sure if the real bear market coming, whatever happened, or what kind of impact on the ecosystem, but I think, still impacts lots of innovations in PoS and in layer one.

Brian: What kind of innovation do you expect? 

Chun Wang: If you ask me, I don’t think innovation on layer one is a good idea, just what I am using like iPhone and some other people use Android just to think about this. If it starts someone started an entirely new mobile operating system, like a Windows mobile, previously, even Microsoft cannot do it. Well we have Ethereum, we have Bitcoin, they kind of have an entire ecosystem around these two major layer one networks, and if someone has started something new, then you have to start a completely new ecosystem around it, you can imagine how hard it is to do it.

Brian: But when you think of Stakefish in the future, do you think it’s basically running validators for different chains, participating in governance? If you project five years from now or 10 years from now, what do you think? 

I guess there will probably still be proof of stake chains, they’ll still need people who run nodes, verify transactions, and create the blocks, they’ll need people to are doing governance, but what changes? 

Chun Wang: I did mention Ethereum, I’m not part of this, ETH kind of is separating products around Ethereum, we probably invest more than half of our effort only on ETH.

You probably have the new Ethereum started staking service after a few months with Stakefish. 

Brian: Yeah, I have heard of that, but tell us about this Ethereum staking service, what does it look like?

Chun Wang: I think we’ll probably do, is compare to other competitors, I don’t see them as competitors because they are doing it differently, we won’t repeat what other people doing. 

Lido is kind of becoming a monopoly, it’s not healthy for the ecosystem. But what we are doing is an infrastructure level things, we probably do something a lot more like lower level, and if you want to have ownership on your own validators, maybe you can check it out.

Brian: Let’s say, I’m someone who has ETH and I wanna stake, I could go to Lido, I could put it there, but for who would the Stakefish product be better? 

Chun Wang: Because we are running a lower level, you can take ownership of your own validator, and what the Lido doing is the kind of financial product.

But what we are doing is probably the infrastructure, it’s like you buy a cloud server and you can run whatever application on it, we are kind of setting you a server, a product, kind of a platform, Lido is doing, they offer finance product they find to tokenize ETH staking and give you a good profit, good APY it’s totally different. 

Brian: Right now we’re seeing Lido having enormous growth, do you think this is, because your product is not a liquid-staking product, right? You don’t have a tokenized. 

Chun Wang: Not tokenized today, I mean, we won’t tokenize tomorrow, I don’t think our token represent validators, probably something useful to the service.

Brian: Do you think, when we talk about Lido and liquids staking, do you think Lido’s market share is gonna keep going up? Or do you think that more people after the merge will stake, maybe running their own validators or a product like yours? 

Chun Wang: I cannot make a prediction for Lido what they perform, we kind of have a pretty close relationship working. We are one of the five funding different service providers to Lido, and we still support them very well, but I think what we gonna do is complete a different layer of things.

We’re not competitors, we kind of just provide different solutions to the same thing. 

Brian: One thing I’d also love to talk a little bit about as it seems to be something that could change proof of stake a lot, which is MEV.

What are your thoughts on MEV? And how do you think Stakefish will deal with MEV in the future? 

Chun Wang: I think it’s completely separated, you can write an entire book, let’s talk about this topic, but the thing is at F2pool, we are already doing this, we have already been doing it for almost a year.

I think maybe you can reuse expertise gained and try to see what kind of differences. And I think mostly it’s kind of similar when you apply to staking, just the underlying consensus changed.

But I think you are right, MEV is critical to a validator and if you want to do staking well then you cannot ignore MEV

Brian: I should add a few words to our listeners who may not be that familiar with MEV, actually, we did do a podcast a few weeks back where me and Felix also from Chorus One, talked about MEV in a bit more detail. But on a high level, is basically because the validator can decide on the order of transactions in the block and there’s value in that order it’s sort of value extractable. 

Chun Wang: I can share with you guys today F2pool actually, Etherium takes 80% of F2pool profit, the reason is because of MEV, when ETH becomes a PoS, I’m not sure if F2pool could survive. 

Brian: Okay, 80% of profits are on F2pool from MEV, and do you guys just run flash bots there or do you guys do something else? 

Chun Wang: There are different solutions, but lately we changed back to Flash bots. 

Brian:  Did you also develop some of your own things? And then how do you think this is gonna play out even after the merge? 

Do you think something like Flash Bots are just gonna be adopted by everyone, or a lot of different validators will have their own solutions? 

Chun Wang:  I think Flash bot has a great team, we definitely like to support Flash bot, but there should be some space in this big market, we always welcome new competitors, I think we also invested some time to do it in-house. 

Brian Fabian: And of course, MEV is also a controversial topic, where people be like, oh but this is maybe bad for the chain, or maybe it causes centralization, how do you think about that? Are there negative effects of MEV and what do you think they are?

Chun Wang: To me it’s not controversial at all because the coded law, if you believe coded law, then it’s not controversial at all, it’s a permitted by code then, why it’s controversial, why it’s not good. 

Brian: Although coded law of course, even Ethereum. 

Chun Wang: If you think MEV is bad, then change the code. 

Brian: Of course, that line is kind of, even the Ethereum community, when it came to the DAO hack many years ago, then they were like, okay now actually in this case, code isn’t law and you had this social consensus that made the change there and kind of reverted this, I would say even in the, even in the crypto community, people hacking some smart contracts, stealing funds, then they’re, well that’s a crime, that’s not okay. 

But then you don’t think the line is blurry because if you have something like a sandwich attack, you make some trade, and then I’m basically sort of doing something that results in you getting a worse outcome. 

Now okay, maybe not the crime, I kind of agree, in the end, you can say with MEV if you assume that people are just going to basically, kind of run an algorithm that maximizes the profit of each block, and then it’s the job of whoever’s building the application on top to build an application so that the users of the application don’t lose money knowing that the validators are gonna kind of run this maximizing function over it, like that kind of makes sense, I think. 

Chun Wang: And all this law is not kind of that absolute, because there’s a lot of law in this world and some are good laws, some laws are not good, get to covid test every day is also the law. But legal and legitimate is different, something is legal but it doesn’t mean you should do it, it’s legitimate and just like Afghanistan, you have to get the mask and in other countries it’s different.

But I think, there’s something universal and we kinda not just blindly follow what we are told, we kind of need to always challenge this good law or bad law, they’re always a bad law, it’s bad code that’s sometimes programmers they write code which has bugs that’s just been, that’s also law, you know? That probably is a bad law, bad law could happen. 

Brian: There’s some discussion in Ethereum knowing, separating the role of who creates the block, with the one who then kind of validates the block.

Can you maybe explain that? What’s the thinking behind this and what are your thoughts on this direction?

Chun Wang: I like this idea but didn’t say that they separate who created the block and who write the block, but it didn’t forbid anyone who takes the post role, the same group of people who can create the block, who can also write the block. 

Brian: Is there still a benefit to the Ethereum proposal if that happens?

Chun Wang: Yes, I think that makes it easier, most decentralized, and also prevents kind of a too big monopoly. 

Brian: Let’s talk about another topic that I saw you mentioned somewhere, you mentioned that you were very interested in humans becoming a multi-planetary species, why are you excited about that? 

Chun Wang: It’s not about excitement or not, it’s something if a human ever survives this universe, it has to be, and when humans become multi-planetary and the currency they use has to be multi-planetary as well. 

Just think about it, everything has to be multi-planetary, heading to quite an exciting future and is probably much time, maybe you can see that within our lifetime. 

Brian: Personally do you have the wish that someday to, visit Mars or other planets? Do you plan on moving there? 

Chun Wang: I’ve been living in the Martian time zone for some time already, and that’s one reason why to live in Svalbard because here we have 24 hours daytime, and you can live whatever you like, on Mars one day is 24 hours 39 minutes 35 seconds, it’s kind of today you wake up, maybe 6:00 AM tomorrow, you wake up, 6:40 and you can only do this in Svalbard.

Brian: I was actually thinking about this topic as well before, I was doing some hiking last year, and I was also thinking about, okay, but now if you had Mars, how would you work with cryptocurrency? Because of course, the big challenge I guess is that information takes a long time to travel between places, what do you think is the best solution to a multi-planetary cryptocurrency? 

Chun Wang: I hope Bitcoin takes that role, Bitcoin has to involve a little bit to take that role, but I hope eventually it will be Bitcoin, I think for somewhat maybe I kind of trying to understand, what look through near the Bitcoin core developer trying to propose, the debate happening in terms of scaling.

Some people wanted to enlarge the block but basically, only looking at the journey proposed, we should act not to enlarge the block side, but reduce it. We should halve it to half a megabyte if you want to have a Bitcoin used for interplanetary settlement, I think it’s not necessarily a bad idea to reduce the block size, and also I think we need to change the consensus because you do not want to only have people on the earth to have the privilege to mine Bitcoin, to make it truly decentralized, to be settled regardless of which planet you live on, and I think Martians should be able to mine Bitcoin as well.

Brian: Would you just increase the block time to 24 hours or how would you change the consensus? 

Chun Wang: That doesn’t solve the problem, it’s probably a temporary solve problem if we increase the block span, but I think there’s another consensus algorithm that’s possible to handle this matter. Just we probably need a serious fork, I’m not sure it’s possible to do some fork, but we need a fork. 

Brian: What would this consensus algorithm look like?

Chun Wang: It could be just instead of a block, one block connects to another, we can make a graph, and earth can generate blocks and Mars can generate blocks, sometimes they sparsely just do this. 

Brian: Sometimes they basically kind of sync or how would it work? 

Chun Wang: You can generate a block based on Earth’s block or you can generate a block based on Mars block that creates kind of a graph. 

Brian: And then you’d have Mars miners, but then it’s kind of Mars has his own little mining thing and earth has its own.

Chun Wang: On Mars, you can also mine on astronauts, you can create a Dyson sphere, people argue Bitcoin uses too much energy. I think those people kind of they have a valid viewpoint, but I think it’s a little bit shortsighted because the total energy in our universe is infinite and it all depends on how you find those energies, you can build a Dyson sphere for mining Bitcoin and also for other uses, and if a Bitcoin has enough value to support to start such a project and we have such a project kick-off that will benefit our whole society, that’s development.

Brian: When I was thinking about the mars problem, the thing that stood out to me actually was that IBC, the kind of cosmos interoperability protocol that feels it should work really well. Because if you have a chain on earth, let’s say we have a PoS chain on Mars, you have chains on Earth.

Now you can make a transaction from Earth to say, oh, I wanna send it to the Mars chain, it goes in the block here, now headers are synced, with the Mars chain but it doesn’t matter if it takes, an hour or it takes some time and then, you can basically have this IBC packet put executed in the other chain.

You can move coins over and then you can have fast proof of stake chain here, fast proof of stake there, I guess the challenge with some of the other breach of protocols, I guess Wormhole and it is like the operators are running a full node on both chains and watching both chains, but that doesn’t work well right? Because now you have a chain of Mars and a chain on Earth. 

Chun Wang: I do think that there is a solution, but here, I think Mars is a major planet in our solar system, it has to be a currency used there, it must not be a security or company coin used there, it could be Mars coin.

If a Starship project goes well, I probably won’t see Mars as a SpaceX company planet, it would be a public society, just here is kind of a few decades ago, it was a mining company town, but slowly turned into a real public town. I’m not sure Mars will go in a similar way, but I hope Mars becomes a public planet sooner, not later. 

Brian: Of course, another option would be that you have a proof of stake side chain on Mars, you could move Bitcoin over, and then you would use, a proof of stake chain to make the transaction within. 

Chun Wang: That’s possible, but it’s not ideal, that’s kind of a temporary solution, but far from an ideal solution. 

Brian: Because the idea is you have a Bitcoin consensus actually be able. 

Chun Wang: Because that still makes the earth a central point of failure, because you see miners as a side trend, but this venue should be politically neutral, politically equal. 

Bitcoin has the solution to make a Bitcoin for an interplanetary solution settlement, but to make maybe another, could be a Bitcoin side chain, it could be other chains for local use, especially when it takes astronauts into consideration.

Some probably on private ones and they can use whatever they want so long as they connect with the interplay settlement networks and I think they shouldn’t bother them for anything. 

Brian: Well Chun, thank you so much for coming on, it was a pleasure to speak with you,  I’m a great admirer also of your work with Stakefish and F2pool.

Chun Wang: Don’t have F2pool for a side company it’s not after PoW becomes PoS, F2pool has to be focused on Bitcoin basically, it will be a Bitcoin company and we’ll make a Bitcoin company, we’ll do a lot of things for bitcoin. 

Brian: That sounds great too, I’m just saying especially Stakefish because I’m much more familiar with the proof of stake and deeply involved in the proof of stake ecosystem. But of course, it’s very crucial to have Bitcoin thrive as well and I’m excited that you’re thinking about how to evolve Bitcoin making multi-planetary now, I guess the challenge is going to be how do you get some kind of hard fork or fundamental change into Bitcoin because That is very difficult. 

Chun Wang: Definitely possible if I have consensus, but if I have no choice but to make a hard fork, I think a hard fork will happen. 

Brian: Okay, well thanks so much Chun, for coming on, I’m excited to see where you’re gonna take Stakefish F2pool and sort of where this conversation evolves around crypto and humans on other planets. 

I think that’s gonna be, I don’t know if you’ve spoken about this on this podcast before, maybe it’s the first time, I’m not sure, but I’m sure it’s not gonna be the last time, because I think that’s gonna end up being a very important conversation, in the next two decades as this kind of slowly starts or quickly starts to progress, thanks so much for our listeners for tuning in, thank you for your support and we look forward to seeing you next week.