By
Temitope Olatunji
April 18th, 2024
Ethereum 2.0 registers a major milestone in terms of the total value staked. The Ethereum 2.0 consensus layer is undergoing major improvements in recent times.
Although things don’t seem to be moving fast with Ethereum 2.0 as expected, they are certainly moving ahead. On Thursday, March 11, the deposit contracts for Ethereum 2.0 Beacon chain touched an important milestone of collecting over 10 million ETH.
Well, at the current ETH price, the combined staked value of all these ETH tokens is $26 billion. Interestingly, Ethereum has managed to attain this milestone in a very short period of just five months.
As per the mathematical calculations, Ethereum 2.0 managed to achieve this milestone at block 14348729 on the evening of March 8. Ethereum’s current Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain or ETH1 is now referred to as the execution layer. On the other hand, Ethereum 2.0 gets the name of the ‘consensus layer’.
The Beacon chain is the core of Ethereum 2.0 which will merge with the existing Ethereum blockchain. This shall tentatively happen this year by July 2022. Even before the release of Ethereum 2.0, the developers have allowed investors to stake their ETH on the beacon chain. To participate in this staking, each user has to deposit a minimum of 32 ETH.
The evolution of the consensus layers remains the prime importance to the Ethereum ecosystem. This is because the Ethereum blockchain is a host to a multitude of on-chain engagements such as DeFi and NFTs.
If we take a look at Ethereum 2.0 deposit contracts entities, there are different players involved. This includes crypto exchanges like Kraken offering staking services to their users. Similarly, other prominent exchanges are Coinbase, Binance, and Gemini.
Terra Overtakes Ethereum 2.0
Although Ethereum 2.0 has touched a new milestone, other networks are ahead of it in staked value. For e.g. Solana and Terra are leading in terms of total value stake.
As per the data on staking rewards, Terra has surpassed Solana in terms of becoming the largest blockchain network in terms of stake value. The total staked value on Terra is currently $31.6 billion. Solana is just behind it at $31.4 billion.
The Ethereum 2.0 remains much behind the two at $26 billion. One of the reasons behind Terra’s success is the high DeFi activity on the blockchain. This also reflects in the price of Terra’s native cryptocurrency LUNA.
While the broader crypto market went through some major correction over the last two weeks, the LUNA price has appreciated by nearly 100%. As of press time, LUNA is trading at a price of $98 with a market cap of $35.4 billion.