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The ETH 2.0 deposit contract has been released.
This was directly revealed by Vitalik Buterin via his Twitter profile.
ETH2 deposit contract released:https://t.co/bDrtf9vRpJ
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 4, 2020
This is version 1.0 of the Ethereum 2.0 specifications, which also includes the deposit contract address on the mainnet.
The ETH 2.0 deposit contract
ETH 2.0 will have a MIN_GENESIS_TIME of 1606824000, which corresponds to December 1st, 2020 at 12:00 UTC.
For the genesis to be activated there must be at least 16,384 32-ETH deposited 7 days in advance. Otherwise, the genesis will be activated 7 days after this threshold has been reached.
This does not mean that version 2.0 of the Ethereum protocol will be launched on December 1st, but only that this smart contract, which is necessary for the launch, will be fully operational.
In fact, to launch the new version of the protocol, which is still in the testing phase, several ETH must be deposited in the smart contract.
However, today’s is probably the first concrete step on the Ethereum mainnet for the operational launch of version 2.0 of the protocol, which envisages three phases.
Phase 1, which at this point could also start shortly after the deployment of the deposit contract, an intermediate phase called 1.5 which should start shortly after phase 1 and which should already solve some protocol scalability problems, and the last phase, number 2, of which very little is known yet.
At the same time, despite some problems, it seems that the testnet of the new protocol (Medalla) is proceeding pretty much as expected, so it could really be time to start this long process that will lead to the final release of version 2.0 of the Ethereum protocol.