By
Temitope Olatunji
April 18th, 2024
Besides the existing testnets, Plasma Group developers are working to reduce the activity load on the Ethereum mainnet.
After four years of meticulous planning and tedious work, Ethereum 2.0 developers are counting down to the final moments to launch the initial phase of the upgraded Ethereum blockchain. According to data provided by beaconcha.in, there are approximately 63,290 active validators as of the time of reporting, who have staked on average 31.74 ETHs. Hereby accumulating the total staked ETHs in the Medalla Testnet to 1,992,505 Ethereum. This is an indication that the testnet has gained popularity among the Ethereum community, who are eager to see the scalability issue solved for good. Consequently, there are approximately 5,433 pending validators as of the time of writing to declare the testnet successful.
Phase 0 of the Eth2 is expected to be launched in November this year. Notably, Ethereum developers are set to launch a parallel testnet alongside Medalla with a codename Spadina. However, it will only be a short-lived system test that will only run for three days.
Ethereum 2.0 is a major collection of events that will solve existing challenges with the Ethereum blockchain. It is expected to run through proof of stake away from the traditional proof of work that consumes a lot of power, time and results in high transaction fees.
Besides the existing testnets, Plasma Group developers are working to reduce the activity load on the Ethereum mainnet.
The project is dubbed as ‘Optimism Layer 2,’whereby the test net will find deployment over the currently trending projects to test Ethereum’s scaling capabilities.
Ethereum 2.0 and Medalla Testnet Bigger Picture
Ethereum blockchain is a huge factor in the growth of the DeFi ecosystem and also the Dapps sector. With the DeFi ecosystem experiencing a sharp growth in the recent past, Ethereum’s scalability has to be solved to ensure the future growth of the DeFi projects.
This is because most of the existing DeFi projects are running on the Ethereum blockchain. To put the matter into a data perspective, according to Defipulse, there are approximately $11.07 billion assets locked in the DeFi ecosystem at the time of reporting.
Notably, the recent rise is largely attributed to the ‘overnight’ success of Uniswap that dominates approximately 18.66% of the total DeFi locked assets.
Ethereum 2.0 is expected to be rolled out from late 2020 all the way to 2022. This is primarily due to the technical complexity of the upgrade that makes the whole Eth blockchain subtle to handle.
With Ethereum among the top crypto project, its success will significantly impact positively almost all other projects, especially in the market prices.
At the time of writing, Ethereum has a market capitalization of $40,327,712,019, and a daily volume of $10,784,038,566 according to metrics provided by CoinGecko. In addition, the asset was trading around $357, having added 4.7% in the past seven days.