Peter Daic, the Managing Director and Co-Founder of Daic Capital, shared his profound insights into the Web3 space, his company's operational philosophy, and his personal motivations during a recent interview. With a background in mechanical engineering, software development, and computational science, Peter first encountered crypto around 2013-2014 but only fully grasped its potential in 2015-2016, a field he has been immersed in ever since. At Daic, he and his co-founders, known for running bare metal validators and other infrastructure services like RPC, also contribute significantly to the community by publishing deep insights, dashboards, and various tools, often driven by extensive on-chain analysis. His attraction to Web3 is multi-faceted, rooted deeply in intellectual curiosity and a belief in the transformative power of technology. Peter articulated that it's "first of all, the technology itself," driven by a desire to understand how different Layer 1s and Layer 2s solve complex problems. He expressed admiration for the intellect within the industry, noting, "the brightest people are working in that industry," often feeling "the dumbest in the room" at conferences due to the palpable energy and intelligence. The rapid "development speed of the technology" is another captivating aspect for him, acknowledging the cyclical nature of building and collapsing in crypto as a unique form of innovation where mistakes are swiftly learned from. Furthermore, Peter is deeply interested in "sound money," championing Bitcoin as "the strongest money in the earth." He firmly believes that money for machines, robots, and AIs "needs to be computational, permissionless," free from "middlemen, with humans, humans who do mistakes or do things and they are not neutral, mathematically neutral." For him, Bitcoin represents "the next evolution of money." Daic Capital, according to Peter, doesn't operate with a rigidly defined mission but is driven by "really driving the technology and the interesting things about the new things which come up." He sees an abundance of Web3 use cases beyond just sound money, from preventing "double selling tickets" for concerts to enabling decentralized AI model calculations and providing seamless incentives for tasks. He contended that blockchain technology can make "some stupid things more difficult," citing historical instances where inflation fueled geopolitical shifts, implying that "sound money and mathematically driven money will make such things more complicated." In their professional relationships, Peter emphasized that "trust is the most important between relationships, even if we are in the trust less ecosystem," finding that trusting people in this space is "even more amazing" given the perceived prevalence of scammers. Daic's operational philosophy is rooted in chain agnosticism, with Peter stating, "absolutely. We are basically chain agnostic and we don't close our eyes for any technology or blockchain." While open to all technologies, Daic's validators are "strongly focused on the Cosmos ecosystem" because they "basically believe in the whole inter-chain thesis in the internet of blockchain stuff." This conviction stems from the idea that diverse applications require distinct adjustments but must also "be able to communicate and transfer value, transfer data with the rest in a very seamless and automated trustless way." He particularly lauded IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication), describing it as "the cross-chain messaging protocol" and "a public good" that is becoming "the standard for all the inter-blockchain communications." A core tenet of Daic's infrastructure is the use of bare metal servers, a decision driven by past incidents like AWS downtimes and the Hetzner fire that led to Ethereum slashing events. Peter stressed the critical need to "have some kind of control about your machines on an infrastructure level." Their operations are based in Austria, utilizing a trusted partner for server hosting in data centers, which ensures "perfect uptime" and immediate access to spare parts. This Austrian location also provides "great diversification in the whole Gale location space" and allows them to power servers with "100% green energy." Peter trusts the "government and also the framework which is built there" in Austria, noting that crypto is "quite well regulated" with clear standards and the European Mica framework providing regulatory clarity. Crucially, their data centers are fully aware of Daic's activities, preventing abrupt service termination. While acknowledging technologies like remote signers (Horcrux) as steps towards decentralized infrastructure, Peter still sees challenges in achieving 100% decentralization due to the difficulty of running data centers in high ambient temperatures. Ultimately, he believes in the importance of validators being "100% GEO distributed" with "different regions, different backbones, different power supplies and total different regulatory perspectives," alongside diverse "signing technologies, different operation systems, maintenance strategies" to ensure network resilience. Daic employs "enterprise-grade" servers with redundant uplinks and power supplies. He openly discussed hardware challenges, noting that "discs are dying," and described encountering RAM issues and smart-scan-undetected disk defects, leading to a preference for more frequent hardware changes over complex software solutions. For monitoring and alerting, Daic uses New Relic for hardware and has developed its own comprehensive "application monitoring" scripts for each chain, which push metrics and alerts. They operate a strict escalation line, ranging from social media posts for governance proposals to immediate alerts that "waking us up one by one in the late night" for downtimes. Peter announced plans to open-source their application monitoring tools, including a Telegram bot for missed block alerts, believing it will benefit the wider validator community. Discussing their "new community validator model," Peter explained that Daic began as a collective investment pool by five co-founders, leveraging diverse technical, business, and regulatory backgrounds. Their initial collaboration with "Danko Zone XDAQ validator" saw them providing technical support while Danko, a content creator, used the validation to fund his work. Following Danko's departure from crypto, Daic partnered with Coinage, a "community owned" media platform. The "Coinage XStack community validator" is truly a community effort, as the media produced is community-owned and topics can be upvoted by the community. On the broader topic of validator decentralization, Peter opined that "final control of a machine or a machine cluster is probably not really possible" because "currently, we still need humans to do that." While he sees potential in decentralizing key management for security, he believes the focus should be on the "decentralization of the networks" as a whole through diverse validator sets rather than individual validator decentralization. Regarding public goods and tools, Peter views Daic's contributions as "low level tours" designed to "make the life for users easier," rather than groundbreaking solutions like Horcrux. He cited a simple address converter (batch 32 to hex) as surprisingly popular and dashboards built during the Terra era as examples. He revealed that they strive to build tools based on delegator requests and perceived community needs. Personally, one of the "coolest tools" he recalls was an early "rich list" for CV20 tokens during the Terra days, built by his co-founders Phil and Simon, which he found highly valuable. Peter summarized the role of a validator as primarily "producing blocks, signing blocks," but emphasized the necessity of an "add-on." He categorized validators into several clusters: those with institutional clients bringing traditional finance into Web3, infrastructure providers offering tools and RPC services, community-focused validators creating content and tools, and those supporting the development of new chains. He concluded that "if you have a diverse set of validators where everybody can do what they can do best, that makes a great ecosystem," agreeing that this collective effort can be broadly summarized as "ecosystem development." In a final blitz round, Peter shared that "Star Wars" has been a lifelong companion. Beyond blockchain, his technological curiosity extends to "everything what's new and interesting," and he loves combining fields like mechanical engineering, electronic engineering, and coding to "build stuff, basically whatever I want." He finds projects like Thorchain, with its ability to "swap or trade native currencies" without middlemen, particularly fascinating. His overarching motivation is "really the interest in everything what's new and what's coming up," driven by pure "curiosity." Finally, he expressed admiration for visionaries like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, finding inspiration in "people who are able to think really far in the future" and how they "act and doing everything at least to bring humanity a little bit towards their vision."