Exaion, one of Electricite de France’s (EDF) subsidiaries, is operating around 10 nodes for itself and more than 140 Ethereum nodes on behalf of its customers, according to a report released from The Big Whale, a web3 news outlet via its official Twitter plaftform on Monday, October 11, 2022.
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— The Big Whale 🐳 (@TheBigWhale_) October 11, 2022
The Big Whale reported that Exaion also validates transactions on over 150 nodes on several other blockchains such as Cosmos, Polkadot, and Avalanche, among others. They are also involved in holding the cryptocurrencies of these networks. Overall, the subsidiary manages over 300 nodes on protocols.
Despite Exaion shunning Bitcoin because its Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism uses too much energy. As Fatih Balyeli, the CEO and co-founder of Exaion told The Big Whale, it only supports protocols “that consume little energy.” The PoW system consumes a significant amount of energy, and it contributes to carbon emissions when compared to the Proof of Stake (PoS) as miners invest in a lot of computer facilities to solve puzzles to verify transactions on the blockchain.
The shift from the PoW to PoS has significantly helped reduce miners’ need to invest in energy-intensive gadgets used in validation transactions. The PoS system is environmentally friendly as it cuts down carbon emissions.
On September 15, 2022, Ethereum transitioned to the Proof of Stake consensus and replaced PoW miners from the network with validators. This shift resulted in a 99.8% reduction in the Ethereum carbon footprint. The transition also caused a 90% reduction in new Ether (ETH) issuance, reducing the daily validator rewards from around 13,500 to just 1,711 ETH.
The reduction in ETH issuance offers more benefits for Ethereum, as it makes it easier for it to become a deflationary token because ETH is destroyed through the burning of base transaction fees which are not issued to stakers as rewards when demand for block space increases.
In addition, Ethereum’s validator rewards are locked on the Beacon Chain until a future network upgrade is executed, which means that stakers cannot offload their rewards into an open market until an upgrade is completed, which is crucial in maintaining ETH value.
