Cloudflare, an internet services and DDoS protection company, has announced a new strategy regarding its Web3 experiments. The company revealed it will run Ethereum validator nodes as part of its commitment to help to scale the internet by using proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus technologies. This will ostensibly allow the company to access the energy efficiency and consistency of this technology.
Cloudflare to Enter Crypto via Ethereum
Cloudflare, one of the leading content delivery and DDoS mitigation companies, announced a new Web3 push that leverages Ethereum’s upcoming proof-of-stake network. The company informed it will be running Ethereum validator nodes as part of its experiment in order to assess the viability of the scaling technology in the future.
Cloudflare stated that blockchain technologies could be part of the story of the internet in the long run and that these experiences might help in the decentralization of such networks. About this, the company stated:
For the Ethereum ecosystem, running validator nodes on our network allows us to offer even more geographic decentralization in places like EMEA, LATAM, and APJC while also adding infrastructure decentralization to the network.
Cloudflare specified these actions will be conducted in the coming months before The Merge, the change of consensus mechanism the Ethereum network aims to execute later this year.
Proof-of-Stake Preference
Cloudflare made clear that it supports proof-of-stake networks due to the low energy usage compared to proof-of-work-based counterparts, declaring that “the energy required to operate a proof of stake validator node is magnitudes less than a proof of work miner.” About proof-of-work-based networks, like Bitcoin, Cloudflare stated:
Proof of work networks are wasteful. This waste is driven by the fact that proof of work consensus mechanisms are electricity-intensive.
The company also declared that, as part of its commitment to sustainability, “Cloudflare has not and will not run our own proof of work infrastructure on our network.” While Cloudflare will start experimenting with Ethereum first, it also mentioned another consensus mechanism, “proof of spacetime,” in its press release.
This consensus mechanism is the one used by Filecoin, a decentralized storage network that uses incentives to maintain the files of the participants. This may hint at the possibility of the inclusion of this network in the set of experiments that the internet company will be conducting in the future.
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