Cloudflare is investing heavily on Web3 and proof-of-stake. The company is also working on the Ethereum consensus layer's R&D. 10.5% of the ETH in circulation is now held as stake.
What is Cloudflare’s Ethereum Validator?
With the introduction of validator nodes, internet security and content delivery network Cloudflare is expanding into Web3 and Ethereum staking.
The American cloud platform declared in a statement that it was adopting Web3 and proof-of-stake consensus with Ethereum. Over the coming months, Cloudflare will roll out and fully stake Ethereum validator nodes on its global network. How many nodes it will run or how much ETH it had bought for staking were not specified. The Beacon Chain requires a stake of 32 ETH, or around $66,500 at the current exchange rate, for each validator node.
Securing the Ethereum economy with Cloudflare
For busy websites and internet portals, Cloudflare primarily offers defense against distributed denial of service (DDoS) assaults and other web-based threats. According to Builtwith, the platform was created in 2009 and today serves more than nine million websites while having more than four million customers.
With a gateway to the InterPlanetary File System, the company's initial Web3 tests got underway over four years ago (IPFS). It created an Ethereum Gateway in 2019 that made it possible for users to communicate with the Ethereum network without having to download any additional software to their PCs.
Cloudflare is investing heavily on PoS due to growing concerns about the energy consumption and environmental effects of proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining. One of the main justifications for the change was highlighted as Ethereum's 99+% energy consumption decreased when it moved to PoS after the Merge later this year.
The company also said that by running validator nodes on the Cloudflare network, it will be able to offer even more geographic decentralization in regions like EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa), LATAM (Latin America), and APJC (Asia Pacific, Japan, and China), as well as decentralize the network's infrastructure.
