Cloudflare, a provider of internet services and DDoS protection, has announced a new Web3 experiment strategy. As part of its commitment to help scale the internet by using proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus technologies, the company announced it will run Ethereum validator nodes. This will ostensibly give the company access to the technology’s energy efficiency and consistency.
Cloudflare, leading content delivery and DDoS mitigation company, has announced a new Web3 initiative that will take advantage of Ethereum’s upcoming proof-of-stake network. The company announced that as part of its experiment, it will run Ethereum validator nodes to determine the future viability of the scaling technology.
According to Cloudflare, blockchain technologies may become a part of the internet’s long-term story, and these experiences may aid in the decentralization of such networks. The company stated the following:
“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 that 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.
