Jun Sato, known as JK, from Stakefish, provided a comprehensive overview of the validator's operations, philosophies, and the broader blockchain ecosystem during his interview. Stakefish, the largest validator on Cosmos, views itself as more than just a validator; JK emphasized that they are an "infrastructure provider for all blockchain projects in the blockchain ecosystem," with Cosmos being a significant focus. The team's strength lies in its deep experience, with JK noting their head of infrastructure has "two decades of experience just managing servers and running infrastructure security." This expertise is crucial, as "it's the node runners that determine how well a blockchain performs." Stakefish prides itself on a flawless track record, stating, "we have not had any slashing or any downtime prolonged downtime for our validators." Beyond providing core infrastructure, they actively build tools like a Cosmos validator leaderboard and foster community engagement through events and marketing, driven by the excitement of "seeing an ecosystem grow out of a blockchain that we're helping maintain." The origins of Stakefish stem from its founder, Wang Chun, who previously established F2Pool, a major Proof-of-Work mining pool. Initially skeptical of Proof-of-Stake, Chun's perspective shifted after discussions with figures like Vitalik Buterin and Casper researchers, leading him to realize that "proof of stake was actually maturing in its research phase and that it's possible that their future networks will launch on proof of stake." This conviction led to the creation of Stakefish, with Tendermint and Cosmos quickly becoming top priorities due to their advanced Proof-of-Stake research. Stakefish's fundamental thesis is a strong belief in "a multi-chain future. We don't think there will be only one blockchain that will rule the entire world." This vision resonates deeply with Cosmos's goal of "trying to connect different blockchains," enabling users to "run sovereign chains and connect all these chains to allow enable different applications." JK expressed a "strong conviction that the cosmos ecosystem will likely be one that will survive the next five to ten years." Their approach to diversification is not merely for spread but "rather it's about trying to support as many project teams that are trying to do their best to expand the blockchain ecosystem." The internal culture at Stakefish is "pretty unique" due to its decentralized nature, with 18 team members spread across various time zones. While challenging for coordination, this global distribution offers significant advantages. One benefit is constant node monitoring and community support, as "someone is awake at least at some point in the day." More importantly, it fosters a "diverse perspective" stemming from varied cultural and career backgrounds, exemplified by their early adoption of remote work during COVID-19 due to insights from China-based team members. JK clarified that not all team members are technical; automated systems handle initial monitoring, alerting engineers when necessary. When selecting projects to support, Stakefish employs a rigorous due diligence process, with one central question guiding their decisions: "is this blockchain contributing something significant to the ecosystem will this blockchain survive and will thrive for the next five to 10 years." They evaluate projects based on technical contributions, the uniqueness of applications possible on the chain, and the value proposition for users and token holders. Crucially, JK posited that "at the end of the day quite honestly it's developers I'll be very upfront it's the developers that really come first," asserting that "the token value cannot be sustained without developers constantly building on top of a network period." The "fish" in Stakefish's name symbolizes their long-term goal of survival, drawing an analogy to fish being "one of the longest surviving species." The company rebranded from Bitfish to Stakefish to clarify its staking services, as "once you hear steak, you're not going to be confused." JK candidly shared Stakefish's experience with EOS, where they were once a top block producer. They eventually scaled down their operations due to the difficulty of maintaining ranking without "a backing of multiple eos wheels," which suggested flaws in the economic design. JK observed a lack of "feedback going in and out of the eos community," criticizing the absence of "knowledge coming into the u.s ecosystem from other chains notably ethereum and vice versa." This insular approach was deemed "ludicrous" given that "the blockchain ecosystem is very very small. It's all about growing the pie right now not about trying to divide up and eat more of the pie." In this context, JK identified Tron as a project engaged in "eating the pie," stating that "it's been a while since we've seen true innovation come out of tron," instead observing an effort to "replicate a lot of the applications famous applications on the other chains and just bringing it to your ecosystem." Explaining the concept of "work tokens," JK clarified that projects like Livepeer and Chainlink utilize staking not for block production but to incentivize specific services. He noted that "there's no exact terminology right now to discern proof of stake versus some of these work token based staking models but I think eventually because it's all still new we're all still scrambling to really put a terminology on this but eventually I think that's what we're just going to converge on just calling them work tokens." Stakefish embraces a borderless identity, rejecting national labels. JK explained that founder Wang Chun "really does not see nationalities he thinks that that is something of the past," leading the team to prefer being seen as "children of the earth." While English serves as a common language internally, Stakefish strives for inclusivity by offering their website in "a whole ton of different languages," including recently added Hebrew. JK confirmed that their mission encompasses both decentralization and "trying to be an infrastructure provider so that blockchain ecosystems are able to drive," emphasizing that while sustainability is vital, "revenue is definitely not like the number one factor." Regarding Cosmos, JK acknowledged past "weak and broken spots" in governance, a concern they highlighted after Game of Stakes. He praised Gavin Wood's work on revamping the governance process, expressing optimism for future improvements. Above all, JK stressed the critical importance of Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC): "the entire cosmos ecosystem is depending on this... If ibc is not delivered if ibc is not what people envision it to be I think that would definitely put a huge huge pause to the cosmos ecosystems expansion." He expressed excitement for usual IBC use cases, such as Kava enabling stablecoin issuance across different Cosmos SDK chains, calling it "such an interesting and that is an exciting exciting defi feature." Looking beyond Cosmos, JK finds "applications that have blockchains in their backbone" particularly exciting, especially those where "the users the mainstream users do not have to interact with the blockchain at all." He cited Terra, Audius, and DLive as examples of projects that "have abstracted all of these issues," allowing users to benefit from blockchain technology without needing to understand crypto native complexities like private keys. JK concluded that the "key to adoption is kind of making the usability to the end uses seamless," believing that "the use cases that will gain mainstream adoption will be ones that abstract away a lot of the crypto native complicated uh issues." Personally, JK is singularly passionate about blockchain, stating, "everything about blockchains excite me to me that's the reason why I'm here." He reiterated his crucial message for the Cosmos ecosystem: "We really need ibc... We need to see that ibc vision crystallizing."