Staking on the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract got off to a slow start with many predicting that it would not reach the target in time.
A week after the Beacon Chain genesis, there has now been over 1.2 million ETH locked up in the deposit contract.
As noted by Vitalik Buterin himself, this is 230% above the 16,384 validator minimum and represents just over 1% of the entire supply of Ethereum.
36,131 with 1,209,409 ETH deposited. (713.83M @ 590.23 per eth). This is 230% above 16,384 validator min and represents 1% of ETH supply.
Active Validators: 26,881
Queue: 9250 (~10 days and 6 hours to activate)
— The # of ETH2 Validators are: (@eth2validators) December 8, 2020
According to the Ethereum 2.0 Launchpad, there is currently a touch over 1.21 million Ether deposited, generating an estimated 14.2% annual percentage yield for stakers. Beaconscan is reporting that there are 26,905 active validators at the moment. A deep dive into the first thousand epochs has been made by this industry analyst;
Exploring the first 1000 epochs of eth2, a deep dive into aggregations https://t.co/0cFHGvsMmz
— Barnabe Monnot (@barnabemonnot) December 7, 2020
Ethereum Long Term Lockup
The success of staking and the timely launch of Phase 0 of the ETH 2.0 upgrade has been a testament to the confidence that investors have in the future of the network.
Any ETH deposited on Beacon Chain will remain locked up for over a year and inaccessible until Phase 1.5 merges the new blockchain with the existing ETH 1.0 chain. All of the transactions, smart contract operations, and decentralized applications will still run on the original ETH 1.0 chain until the merger, which is likely to be sometime in 2022.
Rewards are highest for early stakers but they will diminish as more ETH is added to the platform. Additionally, 2021 is likely to see the emergence of delegated staking services whereby smaller amounts of ETH can be staked easily. Major exchanges such as Coinbase and BINANCE are already preparing to rollout staking services making it a simple process for ETH holders.
Issuance will also decrease over time and the economics of ETH 2.0 ensure that those holding and staking it today are in for big gains in the future, especially when prices inevitably rise due to increased demand.
Network Never More Decentralized
Analyzing the current state of nodes on the original chain, industry analyst and ETHhub founder, Anthony Sassano, commented that the Ethereum network has never been more decentralized.
In his latest Daily Gwei newsletter Sassano observed that there are currently over 11,000 Ethereum full nodes spread across the world. This means that it would be extremely difficult for any government to shut down the network.
However, the problem is that around half of these nodes are running on centralized services such as Amazon AWS or Google Cloud. He added that it would be ideal hosting nodes independently, concluding that;
“I’m pretty sure that ~11,200 full nodes is the highest in Ethereum’s history (and it’s even higher than Bitcoin’s full node count).”
