By Shelly Melancon (Switzerland)
New evidence suggests that there are now over 5.2 million (worth more than $14 million) Etheris now staked in the ETH2 deposit contract. Within three weeks of being launched, the contract had reached the minimum requirement to start a beacon chain. Right now, any firm or individual wishing to become a validator needs to have at least $85,000 or the equivalent of 32 Ether.
At Least $14 Billion Worth of Ether Staked In The ETH2 Deposit Contract
Per Etherscan, there has been a significant addition of ether by Ethereum users into the “ETH2 deposit contract,” with over 5,000 Ether already added to the contract as of this writing. The $14 billion worth of ether staked in the beacon chain contract is an astonishing feat, given that the validator contract was launched barely seven months ago. Right now, over twelve 32 ether-sized transactions are yet to be confirmed. A dune analytics survey shows that Ethereum’s contract is about 1,000% higher than the required threshold.
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, launched the contract deposit in early November of last year by depositing 3.2K ETH as a seed contract deposit based on a report from Etherscan. At that time, Buterin would have spent about $1.3 million to make that deposit. But that same ether is now worth more than $8.2 million. Most validators who followed Buterin’s path to make their own deposit would have enjoyed significant profits less than half a year of launching the beacon chain. Dune analytics further reports that over 27,000 depositors were responsible for the more than 105,000 transactions deposited into the ETH2 contract. Beacon chain charts indicated that at least 150,000 validators are now on record.
More Than 1 Million Ether Added to The ETH2 Contract as of May 2021
Eth deposits were on an uptrend from November of last year, peaking between November 19, 2021, to November 27, 2021. However, the deposit slowed a bit around mid-march 2021 before it resumed an uptrend again on the first of last month. That day alone, the Ethereum contract deposit rose by 27%, with over 4 million ether deposited into the contract on that day.
November 25, 2020, and May 26, 2021, witnessed the largest peaks in validators. Ethereum users can stake their ether in two ways – noncustodial option (the most common options) and custodial exchanges such as Kraken and Coinbase. Beaconcha.in/charts also revealed the distribution of validators based on the amount in their Eth1 deposit addresses, and the following validators are currently in the lead; Kraken, Binance, whales, Huobi, Bitcoin Suisse, Staked.us, Lida, and Stakefish in that order.
Meanwhile, eth price has surged in the past week and has seen a massive rise in Ethereum whale transactions similar to the one last seen in January 2018. Per Glassnode data, the demand for Ethereum continues to rise as NFTs and Defi products continue to grow in popularity. While gas fees remain a huge turn-off, Buterin has promised to resolve the issue with the launch of ETH 2.0.
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