The Base Layer: Nodes, Staking & Dev Tooling | Boston Blockchain Week 2026

Thank you. Thank you, gentlemen, for coming to the stage. I've got Preston to my immediate left, and then Chris, and then is it James or Jim? James. James.

Awesome. Um I'd like you guys to introduce yourself, please, and tell the tell the crowd a little bit more about who you work for and what you do, and then we'll hop into some of the content.

Great. I'll get us started. Everyone, my name is Preston Van Lobos. I'm a researcher at Circle, issuer of USDC, and very excitingly next week, the launcher of the Arc blockchain, our new L1 that will start, yeah, next Wednesday. Um so, on this panel, I'll be talking mostly about various distributed systems, work that I've been doing while at Circle.

Well, that works out pretty well. I'm Christian Loney, the CEO and lead developer of Blink Labs, and I'm a distributed systems engineer that is building L1 protocol on Cardano. I have a node that is one of the primary nodes for Cardano now.

Uh and my name is James Dunseath. I'm a co-founder and the CEO of Andamio, which is building a decentralized credentialing solution. Andamio is a Spanish word that means scaffolding, and scaffolding, for any educators in the room, is the concept that teachers are meant to help people develop their own agency and then get out of the way. Um that's something that's been important to me in my whole career.

Uh thank you, guys. Um let's start on my left here with Preston. Preston, Circle is obviously one of the most well-respected companies in our whole industry. And you've got a launch of a new layer one. You There's other layer ones in the industry.

Can you help us understand why we need a layer one from Circle?

Yeah, totally. Um there are quite a few layer ones out there, not as many as meme tokens. So, the the decision space is smaller. Um Circle, we are launching an L1 for enterprises, really, and to bring institutional finance. And so, because we're able to hold the whole stack, and we have uh this long history uh and reputation of going to regulators through the front door and talking with institutions and enterprises, uh we felt it best to create the L1 from the bottom up to be exactly what we know that these institutions want.

Um and we also have I mean, USDC is kind of ubiquitous amongst DeFi, and so we have that depth of experience to also build off of when we are creating this L1. So, that includes um properties such as very fast finality, deterministic finality, and being able to pay for gas in USDC, so it stays stable rather than having fluctuations in times of congestion.

Um can you uh talk a little bit more about that deterministic finality? Uh like why that's important, and and is that the reason why Circle wants their own layer one to get these types of features?

Yeah, so deterministic finality is present on other chains, but not all of them. So, Bitcoin started out uh with what is now called Nakamoto consensus, and it enables probabilistic finality. So, if you have heard that after you send your transaction to the Bitcoin network, you should wait for six blocks to be built on top of it in order to get some sense of finality for your transaction, this is what I'm talking about. It is not necessarily because six blocks is this magic number, but rather after six blocks, people find it to be very, very, very difficult in order to reorg the chain and to remove your transaction. But there's still this possibility, and so everything past the Genesis block in Bitcoin can technically be removed by a massive attacker that has unlimited computational power with SHA-256.

While that is unlikely, uh this is not something that a large-scale institution or enterprise would want to do, and so they want deterministic finality. Meaning, after my transaction is included in a block that gets appended to the chain, it will always stay there forever and ever, and it can never be removed. And so this is something that we are offering um and we'll have sub-second uh deterministic finality. So all of these blocks will be finalized within 1 second of each other, which is also significantly better than Ethereum's 12-second uh finality that they have.

Uh thank you. That that was a insightful answer. Chris, I see you nodding. You know, when I think Cardano, I always think of who has the best technology, and I always think Cardano does. Uh so can you kind of build on top of what Preston said and explain if uh there's a a reason for Cardano to exist alongside of Circle's I'll take over the world layer one?

[laughter]

Well, uh of course. And part of that is that not everybody is interested in being in regulated US payment rails, uh essentially. So that there absolutely is a space that is very popular and a lot of people want to be into, but there uh space for fully decentralized protocols, right? Bitcoin, Cardano, things like that. And we do have a lot of those same problems that we have to solve.

Uh in fact, some of the work that we're working on on the protocol now is improving finality uh on Cardano to make it uh actually a little faster than Ethereum uh by adding a second consensus layer that essentially adds voting that it reduces the finality on top of it. So you know, these are problems that are fairly common, and it's for probably a lot of the same reasons, uh and that is, you know, especially as you are taking things cross-chain and things like that, you know, the faster that you're able to guarantee that uh the funds can't be reversed, you know, the faster the thing settle. And of course, uh business wants it to happen fast.

Well, thank you for that answer. That that makes a lot of sense. And James, now I it see I would suspect that with your credentialing um endeavors, you're you aim to be chain agnostic and you're probably less to term less concerned about finality times and probably more concerned about composability and interoperability.

Absolutely. Um I I think what in to generalize, I think we're really interested in those non-financial forms of value that we understand conceptually could be stored on a blockchain.

Yeah, unpack some unpack some of those examples for for us if you don't mind.

So So, Chris mentioned voting, right? We We recognize that a municipality or any organization uh could implement some kind of governance on a blockchain. A vote is a store of value, right? Different from money. Um but also just the attestation that something is true, right?

So, all of us are aware of the idea of an oracle. How do I grab information from the real world? Um but what we're looking at is is this ability to say at a at a uh one small piece at a time, right? How do you build up a story of what a human or now an agent is capable of doing.

So, let's let's talk more about agents because there I know my team is a group of developers and they're they're fully developing with agents all the time now for their composition. Um this seems like it just a force multiplier for them. Are there risks? Are there compatibility issues that each of your companies are addressing when it comes to agentic developers.

Yeah, maybe I can start with that one. Um Circle does have a nano payments product. I did not work on it, so I can't speak to that in depth of it, but the basic idea for the agentic economy that Circle's thesis is, there will be a wave of small transactions that pour in in large volumes. And so we want uh our arc uh L1 launching next week and then also our nano payments product to enable very high TPS uh through uh transactions per second in order to allow for agents to pay whatever um for whatever services that they want uh online. And we imagine that there will be a lot of marketplaces that come around and a lot of API endpoints that they can hit that will charge some small transaction fee in order for gaining the data on the other side of that paywall.

One thing I've been thinking about a lot is all of we're kind of in this early stage where the the AI compute we need is cheap enough that it's being thrown at us. Anybody here playing with these tools is probably maxing out their limits on a weekly basis. And John, you're probably thinking about this, too, cuz you're thinking about both the physical space required, but also how how do we deliver the processing power where it's needed? And at a certain point, more people are are becoming interested. Sure, I can I can delegate a $5,000 monthly spend to get more benefits than an an employee might give me, right?

But at a certain point, if I want to work efficiently, I need some kind of certainty that the model I'm using is getting the job done, but but maybe maybe isn't more powerful than I need it to be, right? I I don't need to throw this more expensive model at a problem if I have some kind of validation that a cheaper one will do.

Yeah, you you'd almost think based on the way that some of these agents are acting like inside of Perplexity that they're trying to spend your tokens on you.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

[snorts]

Some are.

Yeah. Uh Chris, actually I want to I want to change gears away from agents a little bit and I want to talk more about the mechanics of of the foundational security layer for blockchains. And this has to do with staking and running nodes. Um some companies like Coinbase have launched layer ones with without without a token. Like a base chain.

Um Cardano has obviously got a token and it's got validators. Um talk to me about where you see the future of blockchain security going as it relates to node operating and staking.

Uh well, what we've found is is that there's a lot of diminishing return in a lot of staking where, you know, the token itself has to have value and we've found and we've seen Circle especially has found that, you know, there's a lot of volatility there. So, it's kind of hard. And so, what we're finding is in general that a lot of things are moving in a direction where it's more uh corporations and companies that are building things on blockchain that are running the validators and potentially uh providing staking as a service to people and things like that where they're using it as a business avenue rather than it being something where people are as much directly doing their own staking, running their own nodes, uh especially on proof-of-stake networks because there's more yield and return for them by using other avenues.

So, what's the unintended consequences you see there? You know, what's Where's the devil in the details on that one?

Yeah, uh that of course brings a little bit of centralization into these chains. And this is one of the reasons why, you know, like we believe that there should be lots of other chains that all serve different purposes. And, you know, you don't necessarily need or want a fully decentralized chain if you want something to be compliant. In fact, it's very, very difficult. It's much, much cheaper to not do that.

And with that in mind, you know, as I'd said before, we also want decentralized. So, what will happen is is chains or uh organizations, industries where they're trying to work on things where it's much more global and not necessarily tied to a specific regulatory body will want interoperability between these chains. And then we'll end up with specific chains that are probably much more regulated and much more localized. So, you know, like USDC, they're running their own chain using USDC. I expect we might see one running uh you know, EURC later, but uh you know, that sort of thing, right?

Where it might happen because it has different regulatory needs. Uh uh so, you know, what I'm finding most is what's happening is there's a lot of need for the simplicity of it, of trying to make things simpler. Uh you know, staking and the process has always been kind of hard. And that's where a lot of people are coming in instead of running their own nodes, you know, they're going with institutional uh uh systems that are custodying things for them and doing staking on their behalf. Um that's interesting.

Can we talk about, James, how that affects what you do with on-chain credentialing?

Well, absolutely. I mean, John, you asked about unintended consequences, right? So, we I think I think the last 2 days of this event, we've we're we're living through the consequences right now of of seeing an earlier era of blockchain and Web3 come to an end. We talked on Monday about how maybe it's good news for a lot of people in this room that that NFT and meme coin is over. I I welcome the end of that era.

Um but that doesn't mean that all of the original ideals are gone. Right? We we

it's not over.

Exactly, right? There's a there's a next chapter to this story to be told where we where sure we get the regulatory part settled. We start to have better relationships with institutions, which has been a goal of this industry for a long time. But at the very same time, there are there are problems that can be solved and better systems that work for more people that can be built on a parallel track to that, right? So I'm really interested in the coexistence of that and thinking about what does the infrastructure look like that sure protects one status quo while also naming directly that some of the ideals that brought people here, right?

Are to solve big hairy problems that are worth solving.

Well, you mentioned the voting. Can you give some other examples of the types of credentials that you're uploading?

Yeah, I mean so so we've created just a a primitive for a credential that can be used very flexibly. And we're we're launching projects, right? This is the kind of thing that like blockchain itself doesn't make sense until it's adopted at scale, right? If everybody in the world was using Bitcoin, it would be a different story that was more obvious to people, right? And in the meantime, we have this level of adoption, but we also have a lot of people who have believed whatever stories they've been told and probably it's going to be hard to change their minds.

Um, we are very interested in trying to find like what is the story that it takes to get some initial reputation network set up so that people can say, "Okay, I can I can kind of see how that works." And then and then to scale that. So, we're we're our infrastructural work is to look at industries where people are already understanding these problems, looking for this level of trust. And it comes from very different places, right? We're we're launching a project with a network of farmers in India where the model is that small local farmers are organized by community, they call them agricultural entrepreneurs who kind of graduate from being a day-to-day farmer and become the person who can help people make sure that their land borders are accurately recorded and they're getting access to exactly the resources they need.

On the other side of the coin, we're launching a project with the football club FC Barcelona next week to bring their fans together and help them make a higher level of engagement with each other. In between, we're looking for ways to find those other pockets of people who have a local concern where the the the local trust that they feel by sitting next to each other can somehow be shared sufficiently without sacrificing privacy uh to allow people to collaborate in new ways.

Now, with your Adamantio, am I saying that right?

Andamio.

Andamio, thank you. Would Andamio be chain agnostic and be able to issue on Circle's chain or on Cardano? Is that the vision?

Absolutely, right? We we built on Cardano because it's it is from a technical perspective um the it it's it's the best fit for purpose when it comes to being able to program data to the extent that we're already familiar with, like uh a smart contract. We're all aware you can write one to handle the exchange of monetary value. Um but there's so much more than that, right? Being able to in a targeted way update the data that says, "Hey, this is what this human or agent knows and is able to do.

Here is their track record of success." It's It's a different vector for value and and what's so exciting is that we can program that value just as well as we can program money.

Um, there's a lot of credentials that exist in our society more than people realize. Your hairdresser is credentialed, the plumber is credentialed, the electrician is credentialed. Is there a future where they all show us their credentials on a blockchain so we know that they belong to the person showing them?

I mean, going to get a haircut, I hope not, right? But But if I'm if I'm crossing borders or especially if I'm sharing data, I think these are These are the places, right? I hope my daughter never needs to show me a credential for me to trust her, right? But if But if I'm traveling or especially if I am If I've built up a data set and I want only the right people to have access to it. And these are questions that average people are finally starting to ask.

We wish they were asking these at the dawn of the blockchain, right? These are the things that a lot of us true believers, we've been, you know, boring our friends with these stories for a long time. And one of the side benefits of AI is that it's kind of waking up the average citizen to questions of data data sovereignty.

Let's Let's talk about data sovereignty because we we all use the USDC in this room and we all know that USDC can be turned off if uh Jeremy Allaire decides. Or maybe a committee, I don't know. But the reality is that that can also happen with our credentials. That'd be a reason to possibly avoid using uh layer one from Circle. Can you address some of those concerns, Chris?

And let me Or Preston, I'm sorry, and let me know if that's something that is not in the scope of Circles layer one, leaving plenty of, you know, blue sky for Cardano to exist with its more decentralized like Preston Atra.

Yeah, um so Jeremy cannot turn off USDC. First of all. Don't worry about that. Um for Arc our upcoming a one blockchain, uh Circle will run some validators, but we have a large network of other people who will run validators as well. That will all be revealed next Wednesday, I'm pretty sure.

Um and I would say talking about crypto ideals and fundamentals, uh one of the fundamentals was this democratization of different aspects of trust, right? So we entrust the users to be able to do many different things, write smart contracts, interact with other smart contracts, you know. You can do loans and savings and uh so on and so forth. And I would say that in Arc, that is not lost in our upcoming blockchain. Those fun Those foundations and fundamentals are certainly not lost, although all of them are spectrums, and so we take our own position on the different tradeoffs.

Uh one thing that I've been working on recently is a new consensus protocol which would enable multi-proposers, which is a fancy term I won't go into it right now, but the idea is let's take the block building parts of the creation of this blockchain, and let's allow many different people to participate in it. So it's no longer gated by the builders that you think of in Ethereum PBS like Flashbots and Titan, but instead uh anyone would be able to run a proposer and be part of this block building process. And so in that ways, we are actually opening up um back to the crypto ideals and foundations more so than say Ethereum is at the current moment in its uh PPOS architecture.

Uh uh let's talk uh while we still have time about economic incentives. And I think that uh Chris, this is probably something you're an expert at more than anyone on the panel.

No.

[laughter]

You know, uh diversification requires economic incentive, right? Nobody Nobody runs computers for fun. Um

Right.

And there's going to be a unique set of economic incentives for Circles chain and as there is for Cardano. Like, can you help us ex- can you help explain like what what you've seen actually work and what you think the future looks like when it comes to economic incentives around chain security?

Yeah. Uh you know, the the the main thing is is again, it really depends on what the chain is kind of like targeted for and what it's used for. Uh we're finding with Cardano that, you know, like the stake pool operators, uh the people that are running the staking infrastructure, are looking for, you know, uh a specific amount of stability in their earning capabilities and that sort of thing. And so, we are currently going through in our governance of how to alter the incentives to make it a little bit more uh you know, to improve those incentives for the staking operators because we are finding that we're centralizing a lot more onto larger organizations. You know, we're losing a little bit of the fringe uh of people that are staking doing their own staking, that sort of thing.

And we're finding that it is becoming more commercialized. And that's something that we want to not necessarily discourage, but push against so that both can happen, right? That's uh the idea with a, you know, fully decentralized blockchain and what we want it to be is we want it to be a mix. We want it to be a mix of businesses. We want it to be a mix of individuals.

We want it to be well balanced. Right? And so we have to make sure that the incentives match that because otherwise what does happen is only people that can afford to run it essentially at a loss because it becomes a part of their business are capable of running validators. They're capable of staking and that's not a healthy situation for you know, like a completely decentralized blockchain.

Great points. It's my assumption about our chain without knowing that will be an invitation only validator system. Do you know can you expand on that person at all?

Yeah, totally. So the validators that will I mean no one in this room can just join as a validator on our chain. But I would say

no one can?

Like yeah, no one in this room can just join.

Okay, so it's not it's not it's not an open architecture in that regard.

It is open but permissions.

Permissions.

Yeah, I would say to expand on what Chris is talking about the mix of the validator sets and my personal opinion would be it depends on what the validators are doing. Validators currently in every network do a whole lot. They are gathering transactions, they are building blocks, they are running consensus protocols to finalize those blocks and add them to the chain. But in a world where validators do less than the mix might not be as necessary. Let's say with this multi proposer thing that I was talking about previously, we take away some of the responsibilities from the validators, then the validators are more or less doing a rather mundane boring job of oh, they have these blocks that they are forced to finalize through consensus, but they don't actually do anything in the construction of those blocks.

And so then maybe the necessary mix that Chris is saying which I really like moves on to the people who are creating those blocks and the validators just running the consensus protocol. I mean that's boring. Why would anyone want to do that? You want to be in the meat of it where you're actually creating the blocks now. So, there are different uh worlds where the validator sets is doing uh varying amounts of work, and then the composition of it matters a whole lot more.

Anyone want to add on to that at all?

Uh yeah, actually that is very much the design of uh the Leios protocol, which is uh protocol that was created by Input Output on Cardano, uh where the protocol had it is essentially sharded, and different parts of it do different uh jobs. So, there's the input endorsers, their job is to gather transactions, and decide groups together, and essentially put them into blocks. Uh and then the ranking blocks do nothing but you know, say yes, these are valid, and they've already been preassembled. So, it's actually uh very much that exact same kind of design. And the idea there is with the parallelization is things will be much more localized.

So, you'll end up with uh essentially local groups that are building their own blocks uh based off of latency and things like that, and then it settles down into, you know, essentially the global chain in those ranking blocks, the finalization of the blocks.

So, really stratifying the entire uh consensus process

three layers, three layers, but

Okay, we've got a just a little bit more time, but I wanted to for each of you, and we'll and we'll start at the end with James. Um let's imagine it's 2 years from now, and we've been each one of you been executing very well on your core competencies. What does your company do 2 years from now better than anybody else, which is the reason why it's you know, got a position in the industry that it has.

Nice.

Um brings people together, makes people care about the infrastructure that can help them have better systems.

And and who are your clients? In in know, 2 years from now, who are your biggest clients that you're serving? If you just to get a little bit more, please.

anybody who is unhappy with our current credential regime or has a need to prove that they know and can do things.

So, the public. Sure. You're you're B2 B2C.

B2 B2C, yeah.

B2 B2C.

Yeah.

Okay, great. Thank you. Chris.

Um hopefully node operators, anyone that is building infrastructure on blockchain. Um we have a expertise in protocol engineering and building the actual nodes for blockchain. Uh aside from Cardano, we've built two other full nodes uh for other chains. So, mostly infrastructure providers uh that are building at scale because our uh main thing that we've been building for is for cost efficiency and for size. Uh we've been building for the enterprise in our design.

All of our stuff is cloud native. So, it's really designed for people that are running at scale, which is a little bit of the opposite of what we were talking about about individual node operators, is we're we're built more that where uh at scale the costs uh you know, efficiency is really start to matter the most.

So, B2B.

B2B, yeah.

Uh I can see a world where in the future where every investment bank and every real estate office has their own layer one to tokenize things on and that would be your company that would help them get that.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah. Uh I think that's a growth industry. I really don't see why every single financial firm can't have their own layer one as long as they can secure it.

And as long as there's interoperability so they can get money in and out.

Right. And Circles leading the way on that, showing us going to show us all how to do it. So, what's Circles Archain look like in two years? Like, what's on it? What's it being What's it being used for?

Yeah, um speaking in my core competence competency, um I would say I would love in two years if Archain is the place that people feel safest to trade and do DeFi and that would be by reducing MEV or maximal extractable value as much as possible which is kind of running rampant on certain other large chains. So I would say that if we can nail it at the protocol level, reduce it, make people feel safe then we will have the deepest liquidity and the largest pools for DeFi activity.

I mean that's a great answer and clearly MEV extraction has been a real drag on retail performance and it feels a little unfair. We were talking before the panel about uh Wall Street flash trading and how MEV is really like flash trading 2.0. I think is how you phrased it. Um so that's going to be a a lot about consumer protection and as much as I like to pick on Circle for their centralization and their their coziness with the government I do believe that that Circle uh has straight A's when it comes to consumer protection and likely continue to have that in the future.

So I wish you the best of luck with that. Certainly DeFi needs more consumer protection. Clearly credentials need to come on chain and clearly there's tons hundreds tens of thousands of businesses that are going to need to be able to create and secure their own blockchains. So I look forward to doing this panel again in two years time and and seeing all these things come to fruition.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.