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The Valid Points newsletter was founded in December 2020 with the express purpose of chronicling CoinDesk’s project to start and maintain its own validator on the Ethereum blockchain.
The goal, as stated in the first issue, co-authored by former reporters Christine Kim and Will Foxley, was to “deepen CoinDesk’s editorial coverage” and “gain an unvarnished perspective” as the Ethereum network made its landmark shift from the original “proof-of-work” consensus mechanism – the same cryptographic security system used by Bitcoin – to a more energy-efficient “proof-of-stake” system.
A month earlier, CoinDesk Director of Engineering C. Spencer Beggs had set up a node on the cloud (currently hosted on Amazon Web Services), and the company bought the required amount of Ethereum’s native cryptocurrency, ether (ETH), to qualify as a security validator under the proof-of-stake system. Then we “staked” that 32 ETH, essentially depositing it into a Beacon chain smart contract. The Beacon chain was set up to run in parallel with the main Ethereum network in preparation for the eventual transition. At the time, the tokens were worth about $15,000.