December 2020 has been a great month for the crypto industry until now. With Bitcoin making incredible new highs, Ethereum (ETH) is also finding its place. Along with ETH price, the Ethereum 2.0 launch is making great progress as the total ETH amount locked in ETH 2.0 contract address has reached $1 billion in worth.
According to Etherchain.org, there are now 1527781.00007 ETH locked in the contract. Given the current price of $665 per ETH, the total amount equates to $1,015,974,365. As previously discussed, at least 524,288 ETH were required to launch ETH 2.0 proof-of-stake (PoS) beacon chain. Given the current ETH staked amount, the threshold of 524,288 ETH has been surpassed by 290% and this has been achieved by a combined effort of 34,709 total transactions to date.
This milestone is part of a much-anticipated Ethereum 2.0 network upgrade that promises to make several major improvements to the Ethereum network, including solving Ethereum’s long-standing scalability issues.
The Ethereum deposit contract was announced in November. Ethereum lovers were to deposit at least 524,288 ETH to this address until November 31 to launch Phase 0 of the Ethereum 2.0 rollout. The total amount of ETH sent to Ethereum 2.0 saw its biggest spike between November 23 and November 24, where the total increased by 145% from 285,888 ETH to 702,848 ETH. Since then, there has been a 116% increase across three weeks. These funds will remain locked until the current chain becomes a shard of Eth2 in Phase 1.5.
Now with the launch of Beacon Chain, Ethereum has moved to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus from proof-of-stake. The launch of the beacon chain does not mean that ETH 2.0 is fully functional. Beacons chain is only to coordinate the expanded network of shards and stakers. It can not process transactions, execute smart contracts, or host dapps. The original PoW is running alongside.
Phase 1 will bring scalability to Ethereum through the implementation of sharding. This will result in the Ethereum blockchain partitioned into 64 separate chains that will run parallel to one another and interoperate seamlessly.
In Phase 1, the original PoW Ethereum chain will be merged with the new PoS chain. The final Phase 2 will enable ether accounts, transactions, transfers and withdrawals, and smart contract execution. In the years following Phase 2, more work will be done to increase the reach and functionality of the Ethereum network.
If you found this article interesting, here you can find more Ethereum News
