en.cryptonomist.ch
Kraken has announced that it has reached 600,000 ETH in staking for the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain.
We've hit 600,000 #ETH 2.0 staked ($1.28 billion) with 11,768 ETH ($25 million) in total rewards generated by staking clients on Kraken! 🚀
Thanks to all of our clients who have helped secure the @Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain to achieve this milestone 🤝 pic.twitter.com/o3hblk7BFO
— Kraken Exchange (@krakenfx) April 19, 2021
Kraken is one of the leading US crypto exchanges, along with Coinbase, and has long been involved in staking ETH for the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain.
In particular, it also offers its customers the possibility of staking their ETH thanks to a pool with which it is possible to lock tokens indefinitely and receive earnings in return.
There are now dozens of pools that allow staking even less than the minimum stake of 32 ETH required for those who do not want to use a pool, although for example on Kraken the minimum stake is 0.1 ETH (about $200) with a return of 15% per year.
Ethereum 2.0 and staking on Kraken
So far 600,000 ETH, with a total value of around $1.28 billion, have been staked in the Kraken pool, with a total of 11,768 ETH ($25 million) in rewards distributed so far.
Since early November 2020, when the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract was launched, almost 4 million ETH have already been locked, with a total value of more than $8 billion. With around 115 million ETH in circulation, this represents about 5% of all existing Ether in the world.
It is worth noting that ETH staked on Kraken is about 15% of all ETH staked in the world.
In addition, Ethereum 2.0 validators now exceed 120,000, with a current APR of 7.9%.
Proof of Stake on ETH
Ethereum’s new Beacon Chain, a new blockchain separate from the one traditionally used for transactions, is not based on Proof-of-Work like its predecessor, but is instead based on Proof-of-Stake. This makes transactions faster and cheaper, but requires tokens to be staked.
The fact that around 5% of existing ETH are staked on the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract means that the Beacon Chain is achieving great success, although it is not yet known when it will be possible to carry out cheap transactions on this blockchain, rather than having to use those still very expensive on the traditional blockchain.
At the moment, the median fee per transaction on Ethereum, for example, is 0.0071 ETH, or more than $14 in fees per transaction. It is clear that this cost needs to be reduced, and Beacon Chain is intended to do just that.