Brian Venturo (CoreWeave) on the journey from mining crypto to the cloud (EP.163)

On The Brink with Castle Island

Brian Venturo is the CTO of CoreWeave, the largest North American GPU miner, which also doubles as a cloud infrastructure firm for general computation. In this episode:

• How Brian went from hobbyist Ethereum mining to wielding a fleet of 50,000 GPUs
• How Core Weave was able to cheaply acquire GPUs from insolvent mining farms
• The implications of the Ethereum DAG file growing beyond 4 GB and its effect on miners
• The effect of the looming PoS transition on miner decision-making
• Why Core Weave specifically limited their GPU fleet to NVIDIAs with more memory
• Brian's stance on Ethereum's transition to Proof of Stake
• Are miners pro-cyclical or counter-cyclical?
• Does Core Weave hold inventory in the coins they mine or do they divest them immediately?
• Brian's options based model for pricing hardware
• The mini gold rush happening in publicly traded mining firms
• Brian's opinion on hashrate swaps or derivatives
• How Core Weave is transitioning from purely mining based to public cloud services
• The feasibility of GPU miners moving into cloud computing
• Core Weave's plans to train an open source version of GPT-3
• Brian's view of the role of miners in the Ethereum ecosystem
• The motivations behind monetary-related EIPs in Ethereum
• Brian's analysis of incentives to make Ethereum deflationary
• Why Proof of Work is an underrated distribution method
• Brian's position on increasing the gas limit
• Why tinkering with the fee market is counterproductive in terms of transactional efficiency
• The relationship between blockspace and fee revenue for miners
• Brian's thoughts on EIP 1559 and whether it increases Ethereum's security
• Brian's view on the pace of ethereum development
• Why Proof of Work launches are preferable to liquidity mining launches
• The current state of the ASIC v GPU debate
• Brian's retrospective on the Grin launch
• Why Core Weave is not interested in miner-extractable value (MEV)

Sponsor notes:

Withum is a forward-thinking, technology-driven advisory and accounting firm committed to helping our clients be more profitable, efficient and productive in today’s complex business environment. Our Digital Currency group is proud to partner with members of the cryptocurrency community. Get to know us at withum.com/crypto.