German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom has become the first telecommunications company to operate a validator within the NEAR protocol.
Deutsche Telekom AG, the world’s fifth-largest telecommunications company by revenue, joins the NEAR ecosystem’s Enterprise Node Operators program to support network decentralization and security.
In a press release on November 11, Deutsche Telekom said it would play a “key role” in the operation of blockchain as a validator as part of the institutional focus of the NEAR ecosystem.
Oliver Nyderle, head of digital trust and Web3 infrastructure at Deutsche Telekom, called the collaboration “promising and innovative,” adding that the network shares the company’s attitude “towards greater data sovereignty and control of user data for the benefit of users”.
The German telecommunications giant says the collaboration with NEAR expands its “staking portfolio” to include a network in the area of “decentralized AI and scalability.” Deutsche Telekom did not specify the extent of its involvement as network validator.
To become a block-producing validator on the NEAR protocol, the minimum stake required often refers to the “seat price” based on the 100th highest proposal among validators. According to the network’s documentation, the threshold changes dynamically based on validator stake, with the absolute minimum threshold set at 67,000 (NEAR) (approximately $383,000 at current market price). Amid this news, NEAR price gained 9.5%, climbing to $5.6.
The collaboration comes just days after MMS, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, and Bankhaus Metzler, Germany’s second oldest bank, launched a pilot project to explore the use of surplus renewable energy for mining of Bitcoin, with the aim of collecting field data that could help stabilize the German energy network.
