The Next Era of Validators

Ethereum Korea One: Genesis · Day 2 · 2026-09-29 · 43:04 · In Korean

Technical barriers have fallen, so why are small validators disappearing? At Ethereum Korea One: Genesis, leaders of Korean infrastructure firms Altus, Nodeinfra, and DSRV speak candidly about the validator business today and in the era ahead.

Watch on YouTube

Speakers

Hyung Yeon Lee, CEO, Altus
Youngseok Yang, CEO, Nodeinfra
Joonkyo Kim, CTO, DSRV
Hudson Jang, SRE & Tech Researcher, Four Pillars (moderator)

About this session

Moderated by Hudson Jang of Four Pillars, this panel covers barriers to entry and market consolidation in the validator business, the issuance reduction proposal EIP-8363, why Korean validators never reached the global top, the role of a validator, and using AI to run operations more efficiently. You will hear the views of operators who have actually earned revenue from this business.

Key takeaways

Hyung Yeon Lee (Altus, formerly B-Harvest) said the technical barrier had already fallen about five years ago. Technical contributions such as winning validator competitions, finding bugs, and building tools did not turn into delegation, and as delegators shifted from retail to VCs and institutions, the barrier to entry became relationships with VCs and institutions: in other words, networking. Youngseok Yang (Nodeinfra) added that there is now an institutional barrier networking alone cannot clear, and new chains are not launching as often as before.
Joonkyo Kim (DSRV) found the moat in trust. Delegation means handing your money to someone else while taking on the risk of incidents, so track record and team reputation become the easiest criteria. On Ethereum, institutional entry has cut rewards for delegation-based validators considerably, while AI demand has pushed server costs up. In Korea, firms above a revenue threshold must obtain ISMS certification, SOC certification is sometimes demanded, custody requires SOC 1 rather than SOC 2, and a VASP license comes with a requirement of about three dedicated staff. These costs keep small validators out.
On EIP-8363, Yang said he understands it as a linear reduction over about a year and a half, and that adoption would immediately cut revenue in half. It is a direction worth considering for the long term but premature now, he said, warning that changing incentives for validators at the bottom layer would push out solo and small validators first and could worsen centralization. Kim said cutting rewards is simply the option easiest to evaluate because it shows up in numbers, and proposed treating inflation as a security investment and reviewing it alongside other options.
Lee noted that for an institution, validator costs are the same whether it delegates 100 or 200, so there is no reason to pay twice the fee. He expected supply and demand to reorganize around cost-based contracts such as white-label validators and node services rather than fees proportional to delegation.
Asked why Korean infrastructure firms never became global leaders like Figment or P2P.org, Lee again pointed to VCs. When asked why they chose a validator, many answered "my predecessor decided" or "we were just close." In his view, Figment and Chorus One succeeded through early ties with Western VCs, while Korean firms survived by pivoting well. Panelists also mentioned benefiting from early PoS demand for geographic distribution in APAC, the pain of time zone differences, Korea's shallow liquidity, and relationships with custodians that grew up in the US and Europe.
On AI, Lee said he feels its impact more in security than in productivity, and described working with about three AI auditors, including Cantina, exchanging model feedback to find bugs. A panelist whose team runs about 700 RPC instances said they are automating the flow from upgrade announcements to tickets and IaC code.

Chapters

← Videos · EK1 Genesis event record