Proof of Stake Goes Live On Ethereum
Bitcoin gives blockchain a bad name, as it consumes so much energy — just to create a new block every 10 minutes or so. At its core is a proof of work method that ensures that it would be far too expensive to provide the computational resources to compromise the network. This is defined as a proof of work (PoW), and has succeeded in creating a robust cryptocurrency, and has resulted in a waste of energy.
Ethereum improves on this by rewarding miners for their work with gas (known as Ether), but this is still based on a proof of work. To overcome this, Ethereum 2.0 now aims to address this by providing a proof of stake (PoS), and where nodes — defined as stakers — must apply a financial stake to be part of the consensus network. As this state is costly, and the rewards are profitable, the stakers should provide a robust infrastructure. We will thus move from “miners” to “stakers”, and which should significantly reduce the energy used. Along with this, we may see the transaction rate rise using a newly defined sharding method.
As, so today, the Ethereum mainet was forked in order to move to a PoS model. Over the past few months, this PoS has been tested on testnets, but these do not have the same size as the mainnet. These transactions have been recorded here:
