Few weeks ago I wrote about Ethereum 2.0, where we went trough the basics of what Ethereum 2.0 represents, when it will be launched etc.
Now we will look into the status of the network, what’s new and look in some tools as https://beaconscan.com/
As noted in the previous post Ethereum 2.0 will be deployed phases in around two years time .
The three phases are:
- Phase 0, Beacon chain
- Phase 1, Shards
- Phase 2, Smart contracts in shards
At the moment we are in phase zero, Beacon chain which main role is to create a registry of validators and deploy a proof of stake consensus mechanism.
This chart illustrates the Ethereum transition quite well.
source
Number of validators
Since the main role of the Beacon chain is to establish the validators lets take a look at the current status of the Beacon chain in terms of number of validators.
The condition that is put in the contract for validators (new name for miners) is a minimum of 16,384 registered validators each with 32 ETH staked. A total of 524k ETH (0.5% of the ETH in circulation). Setting up such a big number of validators (16k) is needed for the security of the chain. Proof of stake does sacrifice decentralization and maybe some security (up to debate). To prevent this there was this condition for a large number of validators (new name for ETH miners) registered.
We will be using the Beacon chain explorer https://beaconscan.com/ to get some data. You can look at this explorer as an equivalent to the https://etherscan.io/.
source
A total of 60k validators as of December 24th. That’s is much higher than the minimum of 16k. What’s even more interesting is that in the last week the number has been going up more than usual. More than 15k validators were registered in the last few days alone.
Just a reminder the ETH staked is locked up until the ETH2 network is launched. Meaning at least two years commitment.
At the moment here is how the deposits looks like in the contract address.
source
More than 2M Ether locked. At the current value of around 600 USD that is almost 1.2 billions in USD value. Quite an achievement. This shows the support and the trust people have in the Ethereum network.
If we take a look at the Ether voted chart on the Beacon chain we have this.
source
At first, I thought this chart represents the amount of ETH deposited to the ETH2 staking contract but it seems that it’s not exactly that. Since there is only 1.3M here, and as we can see the total deposited ETH is 2M.
The daily deposits charts looks like this.
source
We can see the spike in the last few days.
Also, around November 24th and 25th, there was a huge amount of Ethereum deposited just before the launch on December 1st.
At the end a chart about the staking rewards.
source
This one comes from the lauchpad.ethereum.org web. What this chart is showing is basically as the amount of ETH staked increases the rewards for the validators goes down. At current levels these rewards are at 11% APR, that is still quite high IMO, for a blockchain as Ethereum. Probably in time thew will drop bellow 10%.
Overall, the Ethereum 2.0 launch is going quite well. The number of validators keeps increasing weeks after its launch and the staked Ethereum as well reaching more than a billion dollars value. I expect this trend to continue and we will probably see more than 100k validators on the ETH2 network and more than 2M ETH staked. Although if we take into consideration the total supply of Ethereum that is more than a 100M, these numbers are just above the 1% from the total supply. Anyway the trend is clear, we have a large userbase that is willing to lock their Ethereum for years and support the ETH2 network.
