In this episode, Austin talks with Ahmad Abbasi (Syndica) about Sig, a new Solana validator client built in Zig. Unlike other Solana validator clients, Sig is optimized for reads as opposed to writes. Ahmad unpacks the seemingly herculean task of writing a new validator client from scratch and why this was an important decision for Syndica's core business of providing RPC node infrastructure. He explains Zig's unique advantages in this context and how Sig will ultimately make running validators node more accessible for the entire ecosystem.