Who is in charge of updating clients and making sure

we’re not being slashed? This latest finalization issue has me stressed

No risks of being slashed, nodes on the network are overwhelmed and not processing duties, the most it can happen are missed blocked and attestations

We've been very good at monitoring everything with frxETH validators. As Alex mentioned (he is the one predominantly upkeeping the validator infrastructure), this hasn't affected sfrxETH APR or anything adverse with us. We've seen a lot of peer clients drop off and lead to long finalization times. But sfrxETH is entirely unaffected right now. We're making sure not to have any issues. Alex is the man 💪

Phew thats great to hear! Thanks for reassuring me

We do A LOT of monitoring and upkeep of the nodes. Alex is the silent professional behind the scenes making sure frxETH validators are nearly the best performing of all validators in the world. That isn't by accident, we take our infrastructure very seriously. In the past 24 hours, we are the #1 major LSD in performance ratings: https://www.rated.network/?network=mainnet&view=pool&timeWindow=1d&page=1 This kind of performance doesn't happen by accident 😉

Cut a few characters and this would be a very good tweet

Or the community can retweet it 😉

https://twitter.com/0x3689c/status/1657102417442512896

how many do you guys have on the infra team?

The entire core team is only 8 people, mainly 2-3 people. I think we might be the leanest and most efficient large defi protocol in the space right now.

$125m Market cap per head :) All you guys help out with infra or is it just alex?

Alex+Justin+and Travis. Alex is the frxETH infra lead.

Sam what are your thoughts on remaining lean vs expanding the team to possibly grow more quickly? Like I can see the benefits to having a very tight, high performing core team but at the same time seems Frax already has a large product offering plus quite a few areas could continue to expand into. Could see how building out a larger team could be useful for moving quickly into these new spaces.

I think we're already shipping much more than most teams already bigger than us right? How much faster can a larger team exactly help with in terms of shipping? Our core mission is still the same so unless we make up a bunch of random new stuff (which wouldn't make sense imo) we don't need more engineers as of right now.

Totally agree although at some point you'd have to max out engineer bandwidth right? Like I think people at times underestimate what small teams can do. I think Whatsapp was a 10 person team when then were acquired by FB for $20B and I think had 1B+ users (might have been less but definitely was in 100s of millions). At the same time there's no way FB themselves could be run with a 10 person team. You can argue if they're bloated at 20k+ employees but still at some point do actually just need more people. I mean we've got Frax, FPI, Fraxlend, Fraxswap, frxETH, plus upcoming stuff around Frax V3, frxBTC, Fraxchain... I mean not a critique really of current shipping speed but I could imagine a world where having more people helped things go even faster.

You should see Tether's marker cap per head 😁

Of course as Frax DAO increases in size, the core team size has to increase too. When FRAX launched, it was 3 people. Now it's 8 so we've more than doubled in that time. When Fraxchain is getting closer, I'm sure we'll finally hit double digit core engineers. We just don't need 200 people and raise $1B like other people claim they need to do the same thing.

Keep in mind the blockchain is the source of truth. Our backend API for instance is expansive but it's mostly a convenience factor that consolidates data from multiple blockchains and improves load times. But we don't have login systems/authentication because we have MetaMask and wallets. We don't have endpoints you submit payloads to our server to because you submit those payloads over RPC to the blockchain.

Ya I mean fair enough, clearly significant efficiencies to be gained running things on chain. And obviously you guys have much better insight into day to day goings on and where resources are needed. As I mentioned I do get there's also clear advantages to keeping things tight and lean, very hard for me to say if more people would be useful or if it would just add overhead and cost without significantly increasing output.

growing at the right speed is the most important, we keep standards high. I dont want to grow faster than we can find and onboard quality contributors.