On Ep. 92 of Infinite Jungle, Christine interviews Łukasz Rozmej and Marek Moraczyński from the Nethermind client team. Nethermind is the 2nd most popular Ethereum execution layer client used by close to 40% of all Ethereum node operators. Christine asks Łukasz and Marek about their thoughts on Ethereum upgrades Pectra and Fusaka, as well as their views on Ethereum client diversity. This is the final episode of Infinite Jungle Season 2 and the last episode hosted by Christine. Christine shares a...
Apr 02, 2025•37 min
On Ep.91 of Infinite Jungle, Christine shares her main takeaways from ACDE #208 where developers set an ambitious date for Pectra activation on Ethereum mainnet. They also reconfirmed the inclusion of EOF in the Fusaka upgrade and agreed to pursue the largest version of EOF in Fusaka with the addition of a few new EIPs. Finally, Christine announces her departure from Galaxy and the Infinite Jungle podcast. Due to her departure, Infinite Jungle Season 2 will be ending early. The final episode wil...
Apr 01, 2025•41 min
On Ep. 90 of Infinite Jungle, Christine interviews Piper Merriam, an Ethereum Foundation researcher leading efforts for history expiry on Ethereum. History expiry enables Ethereum nodes to prune old block and transaction data from their databases. It is estimated to free up 100s of GB worth of hard disk space. It is also expected to open the design space for differentiated and use case specific client software. Christine speaks to Merriam about the benefits, risks, and timeline for history expir...
Mar 26, 2025•47 min
On Ep.89 of Infinite Jungle, Christine shares her main takeaways from ACDC #153 where developers reconfirmed next steps for Pectra testing, discussed the strategy for history expiry, and debated the merits of EIP 7688 for the Fusaka upgrade. Show note links: Hoodi blockchain explorer (https://dora.hoodi.ethpandaops.io/) EIP 7688, Forward compatible consensus data structures (https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-7688) EIP 4788, Beacon block root in the EVM (https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4788) ...
Mar 25, 2025•35 min
On Ep. 88 of Infinite Jungle, Christine interviews Camila Russo, the founder of The Defiant and author of The Infinite Machine. Christine speaks with Camila about how she started The Defiant, a news site that specializes in covering major developments in decentralized finance and on-chain activity. Christine also speaks with Camila about her views on Ethereum’s value and recent organizational changes in the Ethereum Foundation. Christine and Camila discuss concerns about Ethereum’s rollup-centri...
Mar 19, 2025•48 min
On Ep.87 of Infinite Jungle, Christine shares her main takeaways from ACDE #207. Ethereum developers agreed on another new game plan for Pectra that involves the launch of a brand new public testnet called Hoodi. Hoodi will mimic Ethereum mainnet in almost every way, including Ethereum’s validator set size and network specifications. From genesis, Hoodi will activate with Dencun specifications, which are the specifications live on Ethereum mainnet today, and within 10 days of launch, developers ...
Mar 18, 2025•44 min
On Ep. 86 of Infinite Jungle, Christine interviews Ethereum Foundation Developer Operations Engineer Parithosh Jayanthi and Ethereum Foundation Geth Developer Marius van der Wijden about the recent Holesky and Sepolia testnet upgrades. Both upgrades resulted in major hot fixes to Ethereum clients. Jayanthi and van der Wijden explain why these results are not out of the ordinary for Ethereum developers and what learnings have been gleaned from both testnet incidents. They also share their views o...
Mar 12, 2025•56 min
On Ep.85 of Infinite Jungle, Christine shares her main takeaways from ACDC #152 where Ethereum developers agreed on a new game plan for Pectra in the aftermath of the Holesky and Sepolia testnet upgrades. Developers will launch a clone or shadow fork of the Holesky testnet to support testing of the Pectra upgrade by the broader Ethereum ecosystem in lieu of the original Holesky testnet. Holesky remains in a state of non-finalization. However, developers are still working to restore the testnet f...
Mar 11, 2025•33 min
On Ep. 84 of Infinite Jungle, Christine interviews Hasu, Strategic Advisor to Lido and Strategy Lead at Flashbots. They discuss the importance of the Lido V3 upgrade, the risks it entails, and opportunities for improving Lido’s competitive value against centralized staking solutions. They also discuss the underperformance of ETH and what needs to change about Ethereum’s research and development culture. Hasu argues for three critical changes. First, allocate mindshare away from “endgame planning...
Mar 05, 2025•1 hr 5 min
On Ep.83 of Infinite Jungle, Christine shares her main takeaways from ACDE #206. The call was dedicated to figuring out next steps for the Holesky testnet. The testnet devolved into a state of non-finalization following Pectra activation. Developers misconfigured three out of five execution layer clients when upgrading Holesky. Fixes for these clients have since been released and developers have agreed to move forward with Pectra activation on Ethereum’s second public testnet, Sepolia, on Wednes...
Mar 04, 2025•38 min
On Ep. 82 of Infinite Jungle, Christine interviews Giulio Rebuffo, CTO of Erigon. At only 17 years old, Giulio started to contribute to Erigon, one of Ethereum’s open-source execution layer software clients. He was the main engineer for the Erigon team during the pivotal Merge upgrade and now 22, Giulio leads the Erigon team as CTO. Christine asks Giulio about his experience working in crypto as an Ethereum protocol developer and his thoughts about Ethereum’s technical roadmap as developers look...
Feb 26, 2025•35 min
On Ep.81 of Infinite Jungle, Christine shares her main takeaways from ACDC #151. On ACDC #151, developers agreed to finalize two new EIPs, EIP 7870 and 7872. Though neither of these EIPs require a hard fork to implement, they will still be official documents that live on in the Ethereum GitHub repository. EIP 7872 specifies how client teams should implement the max blob flag for the benefit of local validators and EIP 7870 specifies minimum hardware and bandwidth requirements for validators. Chr...
Feb 25, 2025•22 min
On Ep. 80 of Infinite Jungle, Christine interviews Jon Charbonneau, Co-Founder and General Partner at crypto investment firm DBA. As an investor in the Ethereum, Solana, Celestia, and Bitcoin ecosystems, Christine asks Jon about his thoughts on Ethereum’s competitive advantages and technical roadmap. Jon explains the trap that many Ethereum stakeholders have fallen into by becoming hyper-focused on “endgame” or long-term goals. Jon explains the importance of prioritizing short-term objectives to...
Feb 19, 2025•53 min
On Ep.79 of Infinite Jungle, Christine shares her main takeaways from ACDE #205. Ethereum developers are on track to upgrade public Ethereum testnets Holesky and Sepolia on February 24 and March 5, respectively. Christine reminds listeners that Pectra is the largest Ethereum upgrade by number of EIPs so there is heightened technical risk to activating Pectra and potential for developers to identify unexpected bugs in Pectra even during the public testnet upgrades. Christine also shares the lates...
Feb 18, 2025•31 min
On Ep. 78 of Infinite Jungle, Christine welcomes back Ethereum Foundation’s Nixo and Galaxy’s Yorick to the show. They have a mini-debrief session on the Pectra upgrade planning process and debate how useful exercises like a Pectra retrospective are to the evolution of Ethereum. They also discuss the pros and cons of creating minimum hardware and bandwidth requirements for Ethereum validators. Christine recommends that Nixo present her own document on validator hardware and bandwidth requirement...
Feb 12, 2025•48 min
On Ep.77 of Infinite Jungle, Christine shares her main takeaways from ACDC #150. Concerns were raised from major Ethereum stakeholders representing Layer-2 rollup projects and staking pools about the timeline for Pectra mainnet activation being too hasty. Developers agreed to push back Pectra activation by a month and leave at least 30 days between the last public testnet upgrade and mainnet upgrade. Christine also shares her main takeaways about the competitive value of Ethereum against other u...
Feb 11, 2025•31 min
On Ep. 76 of Infinite Jungle, Christine speaks with CEO of Galaxy, Mike Novogratz, about the underperformance of ETH. ETH has been persistently lagging behind major coins like BTC and SOL for all of 2024 and so far into 2025. Mike speaks to this trend that has been confounding crypto enthusiasts and investors and explains why he is still optimistic about the revolutionary potential of Ethereum. Mike reiterates his convictions about the decentralized web, stablecoins, and how Ethereum remains the...
Feb 05, 2025•31 min
On Ep.75 of Infinite Jungle, Christine shares her main takeaways from ACDE #204. She offers her insights on the latest Pectra upgrade timeline and takeaways on the discussion about how to speed up the governance process of Ethereum. She explains why the governance process of Ethereum is unlikely to change, despite tweaks to its form and structure. War time mode for Ethereum doesn’t look all that different from Ethereum’s regular mode but this may have its benefits, Christine argues. Show note li...
Feb 04, 2025•34 min
On Ep. 74 of Infinite Jungle, Christine speaks with Nixo, who works on the Protocol Support Team at the Ethereum Foundation, about her highlights from 2024 and hopes for the Ethereum ecosystem in 2025. Nixo also shares updates about the new staker deposit CLI tool maintained by EthStaker and her perspective on the Ethereum gas limit debate. Christine shares a few predictions about what narratives will take hold on Ethereum next year and restates her convictions about Ethereum’s superpower as the...
Dec 25, 2024•43 min
On Ep. 73 of Infinite Jungle, Christine shares her takeaways on All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) Call #202, where Ethereum developers finalized Pectra Devnet 5 specifications. She also shares three outlooks for Ethereum in 2025 about Pectra, rollup adoption, and institutional adoption of $ETH. She discusses how a new regulatory environment next year could propel institutional adoption of ETH and how the large size of Pectra scope hints at increased risk in mainnet activation for the upgrade....
Dec 24, 2024•27 min
On Ep. 72 of Infinite Jungle, Christine speaks with Robert Miller, Product Lead at Flashbots, and Lily Johnson, Rust Engineer at Astria Labs, about the launch of BuilderNet. BuilderNet is Flashbot’s latest product designed to enable collaborative block building on Ethereum. It allows third-party builders to create blocks based off shared private order flow. It also incentivizes users, wallets, and apps to share their order flow with BuilderNet and earn kickbacks from the MEV created from their t...
Dec 18, 2024•42 min
On Ep.71 of Infinite Jungle, Christine shares her main takeaways from ACDC #147. Notably, on this call, one of the main discussion topics was not about the Pectra upgrade. It was about community efforts to increase the Ethereum block gas limit. Though prominent community figureheads advocated for an increase, developers on this week’s call surfaced concerns about a little-known technical limitation on the consensus layer that would make a significant increase to the block gas limit unsafe for th...
Dec 17, 2024•33 min
On Ep. 70 of Infinite Jungle, Christine chats with founder of ProbeLab, Yiannis Psaras, about a data-driven study his team conducted on Ethereum node bandwidth availability. The study (linked in the show notes) measured the bandwidth availability of 70% of online and reachable nodes in the Ethereum network. It found that the mean available bandwidth for nodes stayed between 18 to 23 mbps, indicating that nodes do have additional capacity for packaging more blobs into blocks. Yiannis supported th...
Dec 11, 2024•31 min
On Ep.69 of Infinite Jungle, Christine shares her main takeaways from ACDC #146 and ACDE #201. Over the course of two developer calls, Ethereum developers agreed to include two new EIPs in the Pectra upgrade. Christine explains what these EIPs do and the decision-making process that led to their inclusion this late into the upgrade planning process. She also discusses how the latest additions to Pectra impact the upgrade’s mainnet activation timeline. Show note links: ACDC #146 Call Notes (https...
Dec 10, 2024•26 min
On Ep. 68 of Infinite Jungle, Christine chats with Prysm developers Terence Tsao and “Potuz” about their efforts to prepare EIP 7732, enshrined payload block separation, for the Fusaka upgrade. They discuss the benefits of EIP 7732 for Ethereum’s decentralization and censorship resistance, as well as some of the open questions and concerns related to the proposal. Finally, they discuss the likelihood of the EIP’s inclusion in Fusaka and the EIP’s next steps in the Ethereum governance process. Sh...
Nov 27, 2024•44 min
On Ep.67 of Infinite Jungle, Christine shares her main takeaways from Devcon 2024. She shares her thoughts on the Beam Chain announcement and native rollups. She explains why the most compelling ideas shared at the conference were not related to Ethereum’s technical roadmap or ZK innovations, but rather ideas about the values and beliefs grounding the Ethereum ecosystem. Christine makes the case for Ethereum’s new North Star post-Merge to be building Ethereum and Ethereum-based technologies with...
Nov 26, 2024•40 min
On Ep. 66 of Infinite Jungle, Christine chats with Dmitry Gusakov, Technical Lead for the Lido Community Staking Module (CSM), about the future of solo staking on Ethereum. Gusakov explains why he believes there will always be solo stakers on Ethereum staking 32 ETH directly on the network even if it’s an irrational behavior. He posits that a realistic share of validators operated by solo stakers on Lido would be between 2% to 4% and that a meaningful change to the minimum effective balance of v...
Nov 13, 2024•22 min
On Ep.65 of Infinite Jungle, Christine talks about the main takeaways from All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) call #200 where developers talked about all the usual topics related to Pectra development, including devnet testing, specifications changes, and new EIPs. The newest EIP presented on the ACD calls was presented by Erigon developer Giulio Rebuffo. His proposal seeks to address the problem of history growth. Christine explains what history growth is and the various solutions that develo...
Nov 12, 2024•37 min
On Ep. 64 of Infinite Jungle, Christine chats with Dmitry Gusakov, Technical Lead for the Lido Community Staking Module (CSM), about the mainnet launch of the CSM. Gusakov explains how solo stakers can earn 2.3 times more rewards staking their ETH through the CSM than vanilla staking or staking 32 ETH on Ethereum directly. Gusakov shares the technical details of how the CSM works and why it is an important step towards making Lido permissionless and towards enabling the permissionless onboarding...
Nov 06, 2024•39 min
On Ep.63 of Infinite Jungle, Christine talks about the main takeaways from All Core Developers Consensus (ACDC) call #145. Ethereum Foundation Developer Operations Engineer Barnabas Busa announced that his team has launched a public Pectra testnet called Mekong on Halloween, October 31, 2024. Mekong will be a long-lived testnet that application developers can use to test out new features like batching transactions and validator consolidations. However, given the constant iterations being made to...
Nov 05, 2024•28 min
