Ethereum 2.0 Launch Comes Closer as Deposit Contracts Go Live, ETH Price Above $400

05. Nov 2020 Posted by Akolkar B on News

On Wednesday, November 4, Ethereum developer Afri Schoedon briefed about the latest developments with Ethereum 2.0 as well as about the deposit contracts going live. With the current market cap at $40 billion, the deposit contract serve as a bridge between the Ethereum PoW mainnet and the upcoming Ethereum 2.0 PoS chain.

With the deposit contracts going live, Ethereum developers can now start depositing 32 ETH, the minimum staking amount on Ethereum 2.0. A total of 524,288 ETH should be available in the contract for the Beacon chain to go live into action.

The newly scheduled launch of the Beacon Chain or the genesis time for the Ethereum 2.0 has been moved next month to December 1. Post that, stakers will start receiving inflation rewards for putting their ETH holdings as collateral on the Ethereum 2.0 PoS blockchain network.

The staking rewards on Ethereum 2.0 are reasonably high at around 8-15% annually. The despot contract going live and the upcoming Beacon Chain launch will play a critical role in the future growth of the Ethereum 2.0 network.

The developers have been working for years on this. The Ethereum 2.0 will expand the Ethereum network capabilities by several fold especially in terms of scalability and performance efficiency.

Ethereum is already the largest hosting platform for DeFi apps and processes thousands and millions of DeFi transactions. However, with the DeFi rush, the existing network faces congestion issues with gas fees going considerably high. The Ethereum 2.0 will offer massive scalability to cater to a large number of DeFi projects.

Ethereum 2.0 researcher Danny Ryan told CoinDesk: “We’re all excited. This has been a long time coming, and countless researchers, engineers, and community members have put blood, sweat, and tears into this project. Feels good to finally bootstrap Ethereum’s long-awaited proof-of-stake consensus.” 

In September 2020, the Ethereum developers tested the Medalla testnet for Ethereum 2.0 that showed stable performance. As we are inching closer to the launch of Ethereum, the ETH price has surged past $400 levels.

At press time, ETH is trading at a price of $414 with a market cap of $46 billion. ETH is one of the top-performing cryptocurrencies of 2020 with its price surging over 200% year-to-date.

Bitcoin (BTC) which has recently made its news 2020-high above $15,000 has also given half the returns in percentage terms comparison with Ethereum (ETH).