Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain Goes Live As ETH Price Flirts Around $600

01. Dec 2020 Posted by Akolkar B on News

The Etheruem 2.0 Beacon Chain is finally live as the community kickstarts Ethereum blockchain’s transition to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) ETH 2.0 network. ETH holders have deposited more than 867,000 ETH ever since the Ethereum deposit contracts went live in early November.

The Ethereum 2.0 PoS blockchain network promises a range of developments over the existing network and aims to solve the issue of network congestion by offering higher scalability and better performance.

Unlike the existing Ethereum blockchain, the ETH 2.0 network will being magnanimous scalability while being able to host thousands of DeFi projects and simultaneously keeping the gas costs low.

Note that the Beacon Chain is the Phase 0 development and its activation will not bring any major functional changes to the network. All the DApps, smart contract, and DeFi tokens will still continue to run on the existing Ethereum blockchain.

Also, the completion of Phase 0 will take one more year and only after that the Phase 1 launch will commence. ““Phase 1 will implement new architecture for how the Beacon Chain stores data, called sharding. Sharding will subdivide the Beacon Chain into 64 parallel shards,” the developers noted.

Throughout the complete implementation of Sharding, the existing Ethereum blockchain will continue to run in parallel. At the implementation of Phase 1.5, the two chains - Ethereum 1.0 and 2.0 - will be merged. By the time of reaching this stage, the Beacon Chain will have full set of PoS validators responsible for securing the network.

At the same time, the network shall be divided in 64 parallel shards. Only after all these requisites are met, a complete transition to Ethereum 2.0 will take place. “This will be accomplished by merging all of the smart contracts and transaction data from the PoW chain into a shard under the Beacon chain. At this point, Ethereum will have successfully transitioned from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake.”

As the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain goes live, the ETH price continues to swing around $600. At press time, ETH is trading at a price of $613 with a market cap of $69 billion. After falling under $500 levels during last week’s correction, the ETH price has gained quickly over the weekend.

At this price, ETH is trading at over 400% premium year-to-date. Interestingly, Ethereum’s returns are more than 2x than Bitcoin’s.