I don’t do much crypto on this show because, from my vantage point, most of it isn’t ready for IT services, but I did want to cover last week’s Merge.
The cryptocurrency Ethereum completed its upgrade called the Merge, designed to reduce energy consumption. The process moved from proof of work – showing actual computational processing – to proof of stage, where participants deposit (or “stake”) a certain amount of their crypto savings in a pool, which enters them in a lottery. Every time a crypto transaction requires approval, a winner is selected to verify the exchange and receive a reward.
By some estimates, Ethereum’s shift to proof of stake will reduce its energy consumption by more than 99 percent.
I’m still watching for business use cases that make sense — revisit my interview with Omid Malekan if you want a good perspective on crypto in IT services. The reason we care is the engineering discipline here. This process was multiple levels of test, planning, and communication and seemed to have gone off very smoothly. Migrations should be seamless — ask my friend Karl Palachuk — and should you want some reading, here it is.