trustnodes.com
Ethermine, one of the biggest ethereum mining pool, has announced the launch of Ethermine Staking Beta.
“Ethermine Staking is the first regulated Austrian investment offering based on Ethereum Proof-of-Stake,” the pool said.
They provide no detail on what ‘regulated’ is meant in this context with their one page site containing just a sign-up field for early access.
Because staking itself is not regulated as far as we are aware in Europe or anywhere else as it is a protocol process.
However, there can be custody fiduciary relations if staking eth is provided to a third party like Ethermine, which requires KYC for stakers, unlike for miners.
“Ethermine Staking requires KYC to meet regulatory standards, and we will not be able to onboard customers from the U.S. for the foreseeable future,” the pool said.
Relations between stakers and staking facilities therefore will be a bit different than that between miners and mining pools, but there are also decentralized staking pools that can still keep the option of operating at the protocol pool, in addition of course to solo staking if you have 32 eth.
While Proof of Work (PoW) miners will no longer play a role in ethereum after June by our estimates when eth upgrades to full Proof of Stake (PoS).
Hence at least some mining pools are preparing for the transition by themselves offering staking services to presumably predominantly their own miners who may have accumulated sufficient eth to keep earning through staking.
Which may suggest there won’t be any hostility from miners towards the full PoS upgrade even as their GPU gear becomes fully obsolete.
Something that should please gamers, unless some of these miners just keep the PoW chain running alongside the PoS network, creating two fairly identical blockchains.