The team behind the machine.
Chainflow was founded in 2017 to accelerate the development of a more inclusive, equitable, and fair economy.
We’ve supported Solana since the very early days, going back to early 2018. We were in the original validator set that operated on the earliest testnets.
We also attended the very first Breakpoint “conference” in 2019. The “conference” was actually a single evening get-together in Osaka, Japan, that happened during DevCon Osaka that year.
(Fun fact, did you know that Solana actually had a booth at DevCon Osaka? Probably hard to believe now but it happened!)
Back then our founder, Chris, was a solo operator. He helped the initial Solana team design the original Tour de Sol incentivized testnet. He also helped the team think through its original validator set development strategy, aiming for maximum decentralization in a secure and high performing set of operators.
Chainflow’s grown to a small team since then. However, we’ve never taken an outside investment; we remain a fully independent and proudly values-driven.
Because of this we can focus on what’s important to the Solana community and network to benefit the greater good, as our values aren’t influenced by the usual Silicon Valley/VC infinite growth, winner take all, zero sum game mindset.
Beyond our direct Solana contributions, which you can read about here, we lead efforts to increase decentralization across the staking economy. Some of our ongoing initiatives include:
Nakaflow.io, a watchdog resource that tracks the centralization of stake on major blockchains.
The Staking Defense League, a coalition of independent validator operators working together to decentralize stake on Proof-of-Stake networks.
The Validator Commons, a partnership of academics, infrastructure operators, and other crypto stakeholders working to define best practices for community governance on blockchains efforts to help educate, onboard, and support independent validators
If you’d like to learn more about what motivates us, please read about our values here.