The US cloud platform claimed in an announcement that it was adopting Web3 and proof-of-stake consensus with Ethereum. Over the next several months, Cloudflare plans to activate and fully stake Ethereum validator nodes on its global network. It was unclear how many nodes it would run or how much Ethereum it had purchased for staking. A stake of 32 ETH (about $66,500 at current rates) is required for each validator node on the Beacon Chain. Aside from staking ETH, the company is also conducting research into the next-generation consensus model. Cloudflare Keeps the Ethereum Economy Safe Cloudflare primarily protects high-traffic websites and internet portals from distributed denial of service (DDoS) assaults and other web-based threats. According to Builtwith, the platform was created in 2009 and now has over four million customers while serving over nine million websites. The company’s earliest Web3 tests started nearly four years ago with a portal to the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). It released an Ethereum Gateway in 2019 that allows users to communicate with the Ethereum network without having to download any additional software. Cloudflare is going all-in on PoS due to growing concerns about the energy usage and environmental implications of proof-of-work crypto mining. One of the key motivations for the decision was Ethereum’s 99+ percent reduction in energy usage when it moved to PoS following the Merge later this y...
