Ethereum (ETH) Price shoots to $600 As Ethereum 2.0 Launch Nears

23. Nov 2020 Posted by Akolkar B on News

Ethereum (ETH) is calling the shots today as the ETH price has surged above 4% falling marginally short of $600. At press time, ETH is trading at its new 2020-high of $592 with a market cap of $66.4 billion.

Over the last week, the ETH price has surged nearly 30% with a majority of the price rally coming over the last four days. During this period, ETH has added another $100 to its price.

Ether (ETH) remains as one of the top performing cryptocurrencies this year in 2020 with nearly 4.5x times or 350% returns year-to-date. On the other hand, Bitcoin (BTC) has surged 160% year-to-date.

Moreover, Ethereum (ETH) has been attracting institutional investors recently with the Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE) having over 1.29 billion assets under management (AUM).

As the ETH price continues to dominate the crypto charts, we are slowly heading towards the launch of Ethereum 2.0. So far, the deposit contracts for ETH 2.0 has reached 60% of the minimum threshold required for the Phase 0 launch of Ethereum 2.0 aka the Beacon Chain.

The Ethereum 2.0 staking contracts has 314,656 ETH in deposits of the total required 524,288 ETH. Interestingly, the deposits were just 20% until last Friday three days back. However, there’s a massive inrush of fresh ETH deposits in the last three days to achieve a 100% target.

Note that for the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain to launch on its previously scheduled date of December 1, we must reach the deposit threshold seven days before on November 24 i.e. by tomorrow. Well, it doesn’t seem to be easy to fill the remaining 40% gap at this time and there is enough possibility that we might see a delay in the Beacon Chain launch to mid-December.

The Ethereum 2.0 is a transition from the existing Proof-of-Work to a more decentralized Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus model. Also, it promises a whole new level of performance and scalability enhancements catering to a wide range of DApp and DeFi applications. The existing Ethereum blockchain hosts a majority of DeFi tokens as on date but looks cluttered.

While the community has been eagerly waiting for the transition, the Ethereum 2.0 launch has seen multiple delays in the recent times. Recently, co-founder Vitalik Buterin said it will take another two more years for the complete transition to the Ethereum 2.0 PoS blockchain that has all the features like sharding and many others.