It seems like we have been waiting forever for the long-awaited rollout of ETH 2.0, and just a few days ago, COINBASE announced that they now have a waitlist open for users who want to stake Ethereum 2.0. This is a much awaited development because it shows that ETH 2.0 is (slowly) becoming a reality, and it also opens up one more way of earning passive crypto rewards.
Advantages of Staking on Coinbase
The first thing I want to point out is that staking itself is not actually live - this is just an announcement to get on the waitlist, so the details should be considered tentative at this point. With that being said, staking ETH 2.0 on Coinbase promises to have several advantages.
First, there will be no minimum required to stake. If you wanted to stake ETH yourself, you would need a minimum of 32 ETH to run the validator software. Assuming the price stays around $2,000, that would mean that you would need about $64,000 to get started staking ETH yourself. With Coinbase, you can stake whatever you have and the announcement states that there will be no minimums.
Additionally, Coinbase projects that their staking rewards will be around 7.5%. Obviously, this is a pretty nice return, and is quite a bit ahead of the .18% you can earn from lending ETH on Compound and comparable to the 8% you could earn by lending on Nexo. Once ETH staking goes live, I would imagine that interest rates on the other sites will slowly change as more people arbitrage funds trying to search out the higher interest rates.
Typically, staked assets are "frozen" but Coinbase says it is planning to give users a way to trade staked ETH. Coinbase hasn't revealed the details of this just yet, but it seems intriguing, and I can't wait to find out.
Summary
Since I got into crypto several years ago, I kept hearing about the long-awaited arrival ETH 2.0, and I know it has become something of a running joke to poke fun at how long it is taking ETH 2.0 to finally roll out. However, the high gas fees that we are all dealing with are no laughing matter, and its nice to see sites like Coinbase preparing for the adoption of ETH 2.0 with their announcement of the staking wait list. I'm excited not just to start earning staking rewards, but also hoping that this is one step closer to ETH 2.0 finally becoming a reality and bringing us lower fees and higher TPS.
As always, thanks for reading!
References
https://blog.coinbase.com/join-the-waitlist-for-ethereum-2-0-staking-rewards-on-coinbase-1ef15b0b5280
https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking/
https://www.coinbase.com/staking
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