cryptopotato.com
The total amount of ETH staked ahead of the upcoming Ethereum 2.0 upgrade has grown significantly and will likely continue to increase as the launch date draws closer.
100 ETH Staked in a Day
Data from CryptoQuant revealed yesterday that more than 100k ETH worth over $200 million as per current prices was sent to the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract in a single day.
With the new staking, the total value of ETH now locked up in the Eth2 contract is currently more than 5% of the cryptocurrency’s entire circulating supply.
A Major Milestone
Earlier this month, the Ethereum network witnessed a major milestone when the total amount of coins staked on ETH 2.0 exceeded 5.2million ETH, which was worth a whopping $14 billion back then.
At the time of writing, there are 174,318 validators processing the blocks on ETH 2.0 with more than 5.88 million ETH staked in the deposit contract, which is currently worth $11.6 billion due to the current bearish market conditions. The figure represents more than a 1,000% increase from the minimum 524,000 ETH threshold required to move forward with the staking process.
The increasing number of validators and staked ETH is impressive as it shows that the Ethereum community believes in the possibilities that ETH 2.0 will unlock.
The Ethereum 2.0 Upgrade
The ETH 2.0 upgrade was initiated to address some of the pressing issues of the Ethereum network, such as scalability and high gas fees.
The network-wide upgrade will introduce sharding to improve Ethereum’s efficiency and scalability. Sharding will ensure that the network will use parallel processing by breaking up data verification tasks among various sets of nodes, with each being responsible for verifying only the data it received.
Although sharding is a layer-1 scaling solution that will come with ETH 2.0, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revealed in March that his team is already completing a layer-2 solution that would make the network 100x scalable within the next few months.
Additionally, Ethereum will be making a shift from the extremely complex and power-intensive Proof of Work (PoW) to the more efficient Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. The move to a PoS mechanism means that Ethereum 2.0 will become an eco-friendly blockchain.
With these adjustments, the ETH 2.0 network will supposedly be faster and more robust than the current system.