Ethereum’s Shapella update is a cryptocurrency game changer
On Wednesday, Ethereum carried out a critical upgrade to The Merge, known as Shapella, which will further drive the use of the cryptocurrency as a decentralized ecosystem: if The Merge enabled the move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake as a consensus mechanism and thus managed to reduce the energy used by the Ethereum ecosystem by 99%, Shapella will do something closely related.
Basically, what needs to be understood is the difference between the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism, in which many miners compete to solve a cryptographic problem by using relatively large amounts of energy, and proof-of-stake (PoS), whereby anyone can consign a given amount of coins to a verification node and earn a certain return by validating transactions with them.
That operation of consigning a given number of coins to a node — thirty-two in the case of Ethereum — and validating transactions is called staking. By staking your ethers, you can get a return on them, and in fact, is something that many exchanges offered as part of their services: instead of having to…
