10
min read
April 12, 2023

From Ethereum Homestead and Back Again

An overview of the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake, and Earth Wallet's role in shaping the next chapter of Ethereum's story.

Earth Wallet
Earth Wallet

When Bitcoin first began, it was supported by hobbyists who wanted to be a part of a truly free financial system. Early community members bonded through their first experience with non-state issued money, something that had never existed in history. However, In 2013, it became clear that the energy and cost requirements of actually running a Bitcoin miner had outgrown the average person, and the hope of newcomers being able to experience directly, transitioned to alt-coins.

Many early Bitcoin miners who had been priced out of mining and securing Bitcoin, began migrating their hardware to mine newly launched alt-coins such as Ethereum, which provided crypto newbies the original experience that Bitcoin once did, an end-to-end experience of a truly free financial system. In addition to giving individual miners what they wanted, Ethereum empowered non-technical people the ability to experience the ability of launching their own free money systems.

Fast forward a decade, and both Bitcoin and Ethereum Proof of Work grew to consume over 100TWh of energy,pricing out not only individuals but also small startups, large enterprises, and has moved onto requiring nation-state-level capital and energy requirements. At this scale, Proof-of-Work is now disrupting electrical grids of countries by diverting significant percentages of power used to heat homes and feed families, and preventing meaningful compute from being available for education - all to solve a random hash function and order blocks.

Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

Ethereum's ability to now solve the energy dilemma of PoW while staying true to the ethos of free markets is no understatement. From the get-go, the plan of Ethereum was to distribute the network token as far and wide across the Earth as possible, and preventing accumulation of power to one specific group of early investors or miners. And today, Ethereum now has the most successful and largest active network of users, investors, and community events created together by any metric of success. On a technology front, open source Ethereum developers have successfully performed a successful migration of a global financial system which secures and moves several Trillion dollars in value. Something that likely no central bank in the world could do in a decade.

Congratulations to the hundreds of thousands of individual contributors who has helped make this happen.

Earth Wallet's Commitment to the Future of Ethereum

With the successful migration to Ethereum Proof-of-Stake, we at Earth Wallet are now hopeful for a sustainable and efficient future that honours both the ethos of decentralized finance and humanity's need for energy conservation, and are pleased to announce our commitment to helping improve the ecosystem by building with the Ethereum community. Over the past year or so, we have been quietly working on a new protocol to help improve the status quo of Ethereum decentralization, and providing a path forward for the Web3 ecosystem, to replace what is known as 'Degen' culture and unlock the potential of something so much greater.

Since the original launch of Ethereum staking, we have supported the RocketPool protocol natively in Earth Wallet, as we believe they have stayed true to the ethos and vision of what the Ethereum purpose truly is. However what we have discovered since, is that the Ethereum staking market is largely dominated by centralized exchanges (FTX, Binance, Kraken, Coinbase) or centralized staking pool operators (Lido, etc) who are leading users into believing they are participating in this new free market finance, by up giving control of their assets to them. And as history has shown time and time again, this corporate greed, never ends well for the everyday person.

Our mission at Earth wallet is to help prevent this from happening, by giving users the ability to securely self-custody their crypto, and experience what free market finance is truly about. We are pleased to join this battle to honour the ethos of Ethereum, and help provide everyday people the ability to join and experience the real Ethereum community, by securing the ledger, from any device, anywhere on Earth.

Earth Ether is Coming

Earth Ether is a new decentralized Ethereum staking protocol which we hope will provide the easiest end-to-end experience for everyone on Earth to join the Ethereum community, learn about free market finance, and much more, without ever having to give up control of their assets. We built the protocol from the ground up to make use of lessons learned from earlier protocols, improve the new user experience, and provide a path towards the future of Ethereum, Web3, and humanity. We look forward to sharing it with you soon.

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