Interview - Laszlo Szabo

“I hope Railnet becomes the default standard for capital moving on-chain”

Kiln started as a staking infrastructure company and has quietly become one of the most institutional-grade operators in the proof-of-stake ecosystem. Founded by Laszlo Szabo, blockchain-pilled during the 2010’s, Kiln today counts 200 enterprise customers across three continents, including exchanges, custodians, asset managers and fintechs. Yet, now that it has contributed to professionalising the staking business, Kiln is repositioning itself as the plumbing that connects DeFi protocols and real-world assets on-chain with the launch of Railnet, a new decentralised yielding protocol for institutional curators. We sat down with Laszlo to understand where staking ends and what comes next.

The Node: Before talking about Kiln, could you introduce yourself and share a bit about your personal background?

Laszlo Szabo: I started in hospitality school — nothing related to tech. Then I launched my first tech recruitment company about ten years ago, and became passionate about blockchain along the way. A friend explained Bitcoin to me when I was in Hong Kong, and I bought my first Bitcoin in Tokyo. A few years later, another friend introduced me to Ethereum — he was working at Consensys at the time, which was really the only company building decentralised applications. That led me to launch my first crypto startup, after the recruitment chapter. The only job I knew was recruiting, so my first idea was putting CVs on-chain on Ethereum. We pivoted quite a few times after that, launched our first infrastructure platform, and eventually landed on staking in 2020. So here I am.

At the time, there were only a few protocols using staking. Could you envision proof of stake becoming as significant as it is today?

To understand proof of stake, you first have to understand proof of work. Proof of work is the consensus mechanism that validates transactions on Bitcoin. Essentially, you buy specialised hardware — ASICs — spend electricity, find a nonce on the Bitcoin blockchain, and get rewarded with Bitcoin in return. The security of Bitcoin is mainly built on spending: the more you spend, the higher your share of the hashrate, and the more secure the network. The problem is that it’s neither energy-efficient nor scalable. Bitcoin can only process around 15 transactions per second — very far from Visa or other Web2 payment networks. Proof of stake is a different idea. You stake the native coins of a blockchain — Ethereum, Solana, Cardano — and in return for that collateral, you earn rewards from validating transactions proportionally. It’s much more efficient: 99% less electricity, and capable of scaling to millions of transactions per second. That’s why all major new blockchains, apart from Bitcoin, are proof of stake.

When you created Kiln, the market was barely formed. How did you differentiate from the competition as it widened?

We actually came to staking a little late but it’s true that in 2018, 2019, 2020, the market was very retail-driven. What I understood early was that exchanges and institutional players were going to need white-label validators — and that’s where we positioned ourselves. We weren’t the first, but we were among the first to be genuinely enterprise-first. The difference is real: it’s not the same thing to deploy a validator for a crypto degen with a Ledger as it is to serve an exchange or asset manager demanding daily reporting, high performance, and serious security standards. We came in the second wave, but we got to the leadership position.

How challenging is it to navigate between protocols that work so differently, like slashing in Ethereum, no slashing in Solana?

That’s our job. At peak we were running 88 protocols, which is quite a lot. We’ve since reduced that — protocols are like startups, some succeed, most don’t, and if there’s no usage and our customers aren’t interested, we sunset them. Beyond that, it’s a 24/7, 365-day job for great infrastructure engineers to understand the specificity of each network. The core challenge is key security: if an attacker accesses your validation key, they can double-spend or slash your validators. When you’re managing billions in assets, even a fraction of that exposure is existential.

Staking has been Kiln’s core business. Do you see it continuing to boom, or is the growth story shifting?Staking will always be needed. You need it to validate transactions on Ethereum, which isn’t going away, and to validate stablecoins and real-world assets moving on-chain. But I don’t see the staking market booming from here. It’s tied to asset prices — if Ethereum goes 10x, the staking market grows positively. But the structural growth driver is something else: it’s the volume of transactions being validated on-chain. Stablecoins, real-world assets, the true economy. Staking will always be there, but what’s going to grow faster is DeFi.In crypto you have to be resilient enough to be there long enough to see success. Markets go up and down. You’ll have security issues, market crises. Navigating through the storm is genuinely how you reach a successful outcome. And in an industry where everything — smart contracts, protocols, infrastructure — is open, innovation happens extraordinarily fast. Our adaptation started with staking, moved to liquid staking, then lending, and now tokenised real-world assets. The real world is finally coming on-chain after years of narrative. Our customers want exposure to stablecoin yield, and the stablecoin market is doubling year on year while 90% of stablecoins still aren’t earning yield. That gap is the opportunity.

In November 2025 you announced Railnet. What is it, and why now?Railnet is the product of everything I just described. Stablecoins are growing fast. Our customers on Bitcoin and Ethereum are asking for higher yields, not just staking yields. And we saw the vault space in DeFi growing quickly. A vault is essentially an on-chain structure where an asset manager can deploy client capital without having direct custody of the funds — fully transparent, non-custodial. The problem was that existing vault standards, ERC-4626 and ERC-7540, weren’t designed to combine DeFi-native, liquid in-and-out strategies with real-world assets, which are inherently illiquid. A money market fund settles at T+1 or T+2. A credit fund might be locked up for 30 days. That friction couldn’t be handled natively on-chain.What Railnet does is standardise the way DeFi protocols and real-world assets are read on-chain through a state machine. We inject redemption times, KYC information, and any real-world constraint into smart contracts so that when an asset manager manages a Railnet vault, they can interact with any DeFi protocol or underlying asset without needing to understand its technical logic. They just focus on risk management — what they do best. For a regulator or a platform, everything is visible in real time on-chain. For example, CoinShares can allocate across AAVE, Morpho, Compound, a Uniswap LP position, and BUIDL or ACRED — with the illiquidity constraints of the real-world assets all managed on-chain through Railnet.

“Railnet standardises the way DeFi and real-world assets are interpreted on-chain.”

What kind of growth do you expect for the vault market? Where is the real demand?We see strong demand across three assets: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stablecoins. On Bitcoin, there’s no great native yield right now — Babylon and the restaking narrative around EigenLayer are fading. But there’s significant demand to put Bitcoin to work in DeFi or real-world assets, bridging it into an EVM environment and capturing 4 to 6% yield, which is significantly better than anything available in traditional markets today. On Ethereum, base staking yield is around 2.8%, but with boosted strategies through Lido v3 or DeFi integrations, you can reach 5 to 6%. Twice the staking yield — which our customers are increasingly asking for.Stablecoins are the biggest opportunity. The market is doubling year on year, and only about 10% of stablecoins are currently yielding. Exchanges, custodians, wallets — they all sit on large stablecoin balances they’re not monetising. Payment companies will use stablecoins for A-to-B transfers and then put the float to work. A user in an emerging market receives stablecoins and gets a toggle: earn yield. When they send, they unstake; the receiver yields too. That’s the market we’re entering — and the yields will come from asset managers operating in the background.

Kiln is now six years old — remarkable resilience for a crypto company. How do you see it in five more years?Kiln was the staking company. Railnet is the decentralised ecosystem that powers DeFi and real-world assets together. In five or six years, I hope Railnet becomes the default standard for capital moving on-chain. We’re selective about the asset managers we work with — the risk in DeFi is still high, and you need to truly trust your counterpart. You need tier-one asset managers: people with years of understanding of crypto and years of managing client money off-chain who are now doing it on-chain. That’s exactly what CoinShares represents to us — one of the best, if not the best, asset management companies in crypto. We’re very excited about what we can build together.