Phone giant Deutsche Telekom launches ETH Validator

Key Takeaways

• Deutsche Telekom’s subsidiary, T-Systems MMS, will operate a validator node on Ethereum.
• T-Systems MMS will work with DAO StakeWise to operate a pool to allow users to engage in validating transactions without having to run a validator themselves. 

Leading Telecom giant Deutsche Telekom has announced its plans to run a validator to support Ethereum (ETH) staking. The operator’s subsidiary, T-Systems MMS, will provide the ETH Network with infrastructure in the form of validation nodes.

Deutsche Telekom announced that its subsidiary T-Systems Multimedia Solutions (MMS) division would partner with liquid staking pools provider Stake Wise, marking the firm’s entry into liquid staking. As part of liquid staking, users will be allowed to engage in validating transactions without having to run a validator themselves. 

“Our cooperation partner StakeWise collects individual Ether tokens from many different owners and merges them into validator nodes. These validator nodes are provided and operated as infrastructure by T-Systems MMS,” says Dirk Röder, Head of Blockchain Solutions Center at T-Systems MMS.

The phone giant believes its entry into liquid staking will attract more customers and lower the entry barrier for investments in cryptocurrency. Commenting on the latest development, Kirill Kutakov, co-founder of StakeWise, says, “With the move to Proof-of-Stake, we expect strong demand and significantly increasing capital flows in the Ethereum network. We are therefore pleased that T-Systems MMS, as an infrastructure provider, is giving our protocol more reliability and making the Ethereum ecosystem safer overall”.

This is, however, not Deutsche Telekom’s first foray into the world of Web3. In 2021, the German telco giant announced that it is purchasing tokens issued by Celo, a startup that specializes in offering crypto on mobile phones. Earlier this week, Nova Labs and T-Mobile(a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom) partnered to launch Helium Mobile, a 5G wireless service for smartphones fueled by crypto.

The telecom giant’s latest announcement comes a few weeks after Ethereum Network transitioned from a Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism to Proof-of-Stake. The transition is expected to slash the ETH network’s greenhouse gas emissions. Ethereum’s electricity use is expected to drop by a whopping 99.988 percent post-merge.

Currently, there’s an increasing trend of telecom companies hopping onto the world of Web3. Telefónica, Spain’s largest telecom company, recently integrated a crypto payment feature provided by the Spanish crypto exchange Bit2Me to receive crypto in exchange for their tech products.