The amount of staked Ether (ETH) is at an all-time high of over 8.9 million ETH. At today’s value, the staked ETH is worth over $28 billion.
Ethereum’s ETH 2.0 upgrade staking hits new milestone
According to on-chain data from crypto analytics platform Glassnode, the total value in the ETH 2.0 deposit contract has reached an all-time high of 8,965,186 ETH.
https://twitter.com/glassnodealerts/status/1479819044765188098?t=ySDUkebhwjG8BZ81JmntQ&s=19
The number of the staked ETH despite being at an all-time high is still below its all-time high dollar value. The contract achieved its peak dollar value back in November when Ether also reached an all-time high price of $4,870. According to Etherscan, the highest dollar value of the ETH 2.0 contract is about $39 billion.
With this milestone, however, over seven percent of all Ether in circulation is now staked in the ETH 2.0 contract and waiting for when the network will migrate to proof-of-stake (PoS). The migration to PoS is anticipated to happen this year after the blockchain first started the journey in 2020 with the launch of the Beacon chain.
Speaking recently about the Ethereum blockchain’s plans for the year, co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin noted that the planned migration was already about 50% complete. He added that the next phase of the upgrade, the merge which will officially transform the Ethereum network from a proof-of-work protocol to PoS is the merge. The merge will be marked by the combination of the Ethereum mainnet with the PoS Beacon Chain. This will benefit the network by making it more energy-efficient. The surge, the next stage of the upgrade, will bring scalability features to the network by introducing sharding.
Ethereum is still at risk of losing its dominance if the upgrades do not come on time.
The exact timeline for these upgrades is unknown at the moment. This is why analysts at global investment bank JP Morgan recently warned that the Ethereum network could lose its DeFi market dominance to competitors. In a note written by the bank’s managing director of global markets strategy, Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, they affirmed that at the current pace, Ethereum’s scaling solutions may arrive too late and see other blockchains overtake Ethereum in DeFi market share. The warning is coming at a time when Ethereum’s DeFi dominance is currently at around 70% and is rapidly dropping.
In contrast to this view, Bloomberg Intelligence’s first Crypto Outlook report of 2022 is still highly bullish for Ethereum. According to the report, Ethereum is expected to continue to be a dominant blockchain along with Bitcoin. While the price of Ether has taken a hit along with the rest of the cryptocurrency market, the report expects that this year Ether will finally break through the $5,000 barrier. At the moment Ether I trading at around $3,100, down 13.9% in the last seven days.
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