Clemens CryptoCrew, one of the founders of CryptoCrew Validators, shared insights into his company's operations, philosophy, and the broader blockchain landscape during his interview on Citizen Web3. CryptoCrew originated from a private, non-profit, German-speaking Telegram channel of "OG Bitcoin investors" established in 2013. The co-founding team, a diverse group some of whom met initially through the Telegram chat, began running nodes in 2017-2018 but truly started their endeavors in the Cosmos ecosystem in 2020. They joined Osmosis's active validator set shortly after its genesis and have since expanded to support 35 chains. A core focus, beyond validation, is IBC relaying, with CryptoCrew being among the first and most active relayers, having processed over 10 million IBC transactions. Clemens stated their vision is "to propel interchange scalability and adoption, and this is why we're providing very powerful service and very secure infrastructure to the chains that we support." The company operates with a small team of seven, working together physically in an office in Graz, Austria. The technical department consists of three people focused on development and DevOps, who also contribute code to projects like Persistence and Comdex. The remaining team handles support, governance, management, and finance. Clemens highlighted that challenges are diverse, with operators facing scalability issues alongside maintaining secure operations, while others deal with governance and business development decisions, particularly in choosing which chains to support amidst the rapid growth of interchain-connected blockchains. He stressed CryptoCrew's belief that "A validator's job is not only to sign blogs," emphasizing their commitment to contributing to governance, providing relays, and developing code to advance the ecosystems they support. CryptoCrew has discontinued validation for only one chain, Terra Classic, citing concerns over its development status, outdated dependencies, and potential vulnerabilities. Clemens shared his personal opinion on Do Kwon, stating that while there were "architectural flaws for sure" in Terra, he believed "the vision of Terra, even though there were obvious architectural flaws, I think the vision was actually really, really great," and he felt it was "very hard on his person that he had to go to jail." For CryptoCrew, the "Interchain" signifies any blockchain connected via the IBC protocol, potentially including Ethereum in the future, but definitely encompassing chains built on the Cosmos SDK and those made IBC-compatible like Avalanche subnets or Polkadot via Composable Finance. They are dedicated to interoperability and the AppChain thesis, believing IBC will become the standard. CryptoCrew actively collaborates on projects, working with Informal Systems on Hermes Relayer performance improvements, HIFA on interchain security, and supporting the Neutron team during its launch by providing testing environments and relayer systems. Their support for Neutron stemmed from their role as a Cosmos Hub validator and their investment in the future of the Interchain, aligning with the Interchain Security value proposition and the AppChain thesis of a dedicated smart contract consumer chain. Describing CryptoCrew as "community-based," Clemens explained this means they are a sovereign company without large venture capital backing, largely invested personally by the founders, and maintaining a close relationship with the communities they support. He admitted that running a validation company can be challenging, especially in a bear market, revealing that the last 12 months "weren't even profitable" for CryptoCrew, necessitating an investor to survive. The primary costs for their EU-registered company are labor (employment in Austria with its social system) and infrastructure. They utilize "bare metal nodes," meaning rented dedicated root servers across six data center partners in Europe, and run private RPCs, sometimes operating almost ten nodes per network on high-value chains like the Hub and Osmosis. A key aspect of their infrastructure is the use of Horcrux, a multi-party threshold signer developed by Strangelove. Clemens detailed its function: it allows the private validator key to be split into shards (e.g., two out of three threshold), deployed to dedicated remote signer nodes, rather than the full key residing on the blockchain node itself. This setup significantly boosts operational security, requiring an attacker to compromise a threshold of signer nodes. It also enhances redundancy and liveliness, as the validator can continue signing if one signer node fails, without missing a block. Horcrux also provides "additional protection against double signing." While acknowledging the increased latency with remote signers, which can lead to higher missed block rates on fast networks like Injective, Clemens stressed that "blockchain to be lively" only requires two-thirds of validators signing blocks, making "anything above 90% is fine with us." He cautioned that delegators often seek 100% uptime, which can paradoxically indicate "less secure architecture than a validator which misses a block from time to time." Clemens articulated his deeper motivation for being in blockchain: "Blockchain, it makes a better future possible. It builds an infrastructure for decentralized decision making." He sees their current work as "building tooling and... infrastructure to be better" in anticipation of a "killer application" that will emerge to fully realize blockchain's potential. He also embraces "drama per second" (DPS) in Cosmos governance as a positive feature, believing "it really shows the liveliness and the variety of opinions in a really decentralized community," and ultimately helps the community improve. Regarding validator participation in governance, CryptoCrew recently decided to abstain from community spend proposals to "align our votes better with the interests of the community." He noted that the Cosmos governance module is a basic 2019 design by Sunny, now tasked with "very complex questions," leading to governance burnout. He envisions future Cosmos governance evolving into "something better structured with more hierarchies," potentially involving representatives or governors, similar to how Interchain Security offers infrastructure for delegators to delegate voting power to governors on consumer chains. When asked his three favorite chains, Clemens named the Cosmos Hub for its "beautiful employment of the app chain thesis," Osmosis as "the real hop of the users," and Juno, because "drama is a feature." His personal motivations for his work are "numbers," finding satisfaction in solving problems, and "building something that really matters as an infrastructure for the future of the whole world." Finally, he identified Jacob Gadikian as his main inspiration, admiring his "truthfulness" and willingness to speak his mind.