Germany’s Deutsche Telekom joins NEAR as blockchain validator

German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom has become the first telecommunications company to run validators under the NEAR Protocol.

Deutsche Telekom AG, the world’s fifth largest telecommunications company by revenue, is participating in the NEAR ecosystem’s Enterprise Node Operators program to support decentralized management and security of the network.

Deutsche Telekom said in a press release on November 11 that it will play a “key role” in the functioning of the blockchain as a validator as part of the corporate direction of the NEAR ecosystem.

Deutsche Telekom’s head of digital trust and web3 infrastructure, Oliver Nyderle, called the collaboration “promising and innovative”, adding that the network shares the company’s stance “towards greater data sovereignty and user data control for the benefit of users”.

The German telecommunications giant says the collaboration with NEAR expands its “staking portfolio” to include a network in “decentralized artificial intelligence and scalability.” Deutsche Telekom did not specify the scale of its involvement as a validator of the network.

The minimum stake required to become a block-producing validator on the NEAR Protocol generally refers to the “seat price” based on the 100th highest bid among validators. According to the network’s documentation, the threshold changes dynamically based on validator participation, with the absolute minimum threshold being set at 67,000 (NEAR) (approximately $383,000 at current market price). Following the news, the NEAR price rose 9.5% to $5.6.

The collaboration comes just a few days after Deutsche Telekom subsidiary MMS and Bankhaus Metzler, Germany’s second-oldest bank, launched a pilot project to explore the use of excess renewable energy for Bitcoin mining, aiming to collect field data that could help stabilize Germany’s power grid. It happened a day later.