my interest in the topic of validators started when Ethereum transitioned to a proof-of-stake, validator secured network, from proof-of-work.
everyone who was anyone in crypto was talking about validators, writing about validators, recording and sharing videos about validators.
naturally, I tuned into my own skillset: writing — and used my newsletter as an outlet, to share with my community, my subscribers, what proof-of-stake and validators are, why it’s important, and what it means.
of course, I was also doing this for my personal development and growth. writing is thinking. we learn through writing.
I wrote this post Staking ETH, A lay of the land and published it to my blog Sharing is Caring.
Okay, so that’s that for writing and learning — the entry point — into validators.
Great, but then what?
The next step came over a year later, when 404 Gov (now Axia Network) started to run a validator node on the NEAR blockchain. The pieces fell together when 404 became a delegate in NEAR’s House of Stake and I met Alan, a fellow delegate in HoS, and a Metapool Ambassador. We first started to work together as part of the NEAR Economics and Security Working Group, which I was leading as a delegate in the earliest days of House of Stake. And then we met in person at a delegate event in Cannes, France on the backbone of the ETHCC conference in the summer of 2025. It was a very very hot and humid summer for the entire french riviera. 😅
Clearly I had an interested in validators, from writing my newsletter, which is why I volunteered to lead the network economics and security working group. And a few years back, I took the Token Engineering course, because I wanted to better understand token economics and network design. Even at ConsenSys, where I previously worked, this interest existed.
so, the interest of token engineering, designing token systems, validator economics, has always been there. but the challenge is how do you put your interest to work. This is where the Metapool program comes in. Effectively it incentivizes people to stake, to vote, to this and that ..