On the morning of April 12, thousands of software engineers and crypto investors around the world held their breath.
In Sydney’s CBD, a trading outfit called DACM had amended the software of its crypto-staking equipment to accept the upgrade.“It was a major change, but there’s a lot of talent and trust in the ethereum team,” said Richard Galvin, the co-founder and chief executive officer of DACM. “We’d been staking for several months and things were going pretty well.”
“But finally users were going to be able to withdraw ether from the network. It’s quite a milestone in the development of this technology.”Ethereum, which operates like a global computer, allows developers to publish and execute applications powered by smart contracts. These are programmable scripts that facilitate the flow of digital assets.
users of the network to “pledge” their money – in the form of ether – to verify and confirm blocks of transactionsThese pledges were made through a kind of server called a “node”. Theoretically, anybody could set up a node, and across Australia several companies were quick to try it out.David Lavecky, chief executive of Canvas Digital, a payments provider helping the Reserve Bank of Australia with its crypto experiments, had previously been a large ethereum miner.
As it stands, there are roughly 156 validator nodes running across Australia, which account for about 2.2 per cent of all Ethereum activity. In total, there are around 7211 nodes, with the bulk of validators coming from the United States and Germany. At the time, the network calculated it would begin paying yields returning about 5 per cent on average per validator.