In this episode, Sunny Ray talks with Aidan Hyman, co-founder of ChainSafe, a Toronto based blockchain research and development firm. Aidan traces his path from an early, speculative introduction to Bitcoin in 2014 to becoming fully immersed in Ethereum after a co-founder started mining it. He explains what first captivated him, not the technology itself but the potential for decentralized autonomous organizations to reshape legal agreements and corporate structures. Aidan recounts meeting his ChainSafe co-founders through Toronto meetups, including Bitcoin Bay and the Ethereum developers meetup, and how those community gatherings shaped the company's origins in 2017. He walks through ChainSafe's evolution from small open source tools like a USB cold storage project to becoming key contributors to Eth2 (Lodestar), Polkadot (Gossamer), Cosmos (Ethermint), and Filecoin. The conversation dives into DAOs like MakerDAO and Aragon, the shift to proof of stake consensus, sharding, and why Aidan believes most criticism of staking is ideological rather than technical. The episode closes with reflections on virtual events during the pandemic and ChainSafe's own conference, CSCON.
ChainSafe co-founder Aidan Hyman on DAOs, Eth2, and building Web3 infrastructure from Toronto meetups.
Was your first exposure to crypto through Bitcoin or Ethereum?
It was Bitcoin before Ethereum. I had a friend trying to get me into Bitcoin back in 2014, the classic story everyone seems to have. It wasn't until one of my other co-founders started mining Ethereum that my interest grew beyond it just being a speculative asset. That's when I really started wanting to learn more and going to meetups.
What was your lens coming into this space, more tech or non-tech?
Honestly what excited me most was the non-tech side, the fact that we could codify agreements and law. I was blown away by the potential for decentralized autonomous organizations to disintermediate the actors sitting in the middle of things like starting a company or entering a partnership, both cutting the actual cost and the mental cost involved.
Can you explain what makes something like MakerDAO actually a DAO?
What makes them a DAO is that decisions on governing the platform are coordinated through the platform itself by token holders. Token holders make and vote on proposals that become binding to the system, deciding things like rates and structures. MakerDAO is a great example, it just hit a one billion dollar milestone for Dai created through that governance.
How did ChainSafe actually get started?
Spiritually it started in February 2017, legally in May 2017. We met at meetups like Bitcoin Bay and the Ethereum developers meetup in Toronto, one co-founder was my best friend from high school. We're now a 45 person blockchain research and development firm and our mission is building the infrastructure needed to catapult this new internet, Web3.
Why were in-person meetups so important to your journey?
They connected us, taught us new things, and let us learn from people already in the space full time. It gave us a real taste of what the community looked like practically, and also a reality check on how much work was still left to do, even back in 2016 and 2017 when things already felt accelerated.
What are the major projects ChainSafe contributes to?
We built Lodestar, an Eth2 implementation with developer tooling in TypeScript, and we maintain web3.js, which we're extending with Eth2 support. We also built Gossamer, a Polkadot host implementation, became maintainers of Ethermint on Cosmos SDK, and contributed a Rust implementation to Filecoin. Each came from seeing technology we believed would have a massive ecosystem impact.
What actually makes Eth2 better than Eth1?
The two big changes are moving consensus to proof of stake, which cuts the computational waste of proof of work, and sharding, which splits execution across many shards instead of one chain doing everything, similar to breaking up a database. Together these are meant to be a new paradigm for transactions per second and security.
What's the biggest criticism of proof of stake, and has it been proven at scale?
I'd say the arguments against it are mostly ideological at this point, not technological. We've already seen proof of stake work successfully in chains like Cosmos and Polkadot, which we contribute to. A sharded proof of stake chain at Ethereum's scale hasn't existed yet, since the only bigger chain by value is Bitcoin, but the concept itself has proven out.
Building something daring? Sunny talks to founders like this every day. Fifteen minutes to see if your story belongs on the stage.
Claim your pre-interview