Infinite Jungle

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 fi...

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...

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 cl...

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.ethereu...

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 chan...

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, wh...

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 develo...

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 re...

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 cu...

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 a...

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 a...

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 loc...

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 o...

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 identif...

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. Chr...

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 upgra...

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. Mi...

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 d...

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...

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 a...

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...

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 limitatio...

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, indicati...

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 P...

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 likelih...