21 Dec 2021
The state of Ethereum 2.0
Since the launch of the Beacon Chain on Dec 1, 2020, over 8.6M Ether has been staked on the Ethereum blockchain, currently worth an astounding $33.5B. That’s over 271,000 validators, all staking 32 ETH each to secure the Beacon Chain.
At the time of writing, just under 9M Ether has been staked on Ethereum’s Proof of Stake. This represents 7.33% of all Ether which are locked until withdrawals are enabled, indicating huge confidence in the future of the network.The amount of ETH staked is expected to continue its gradual increase until post-merge due to increased APY, as a result of unburnt fee revenue and MEV going to stakers instead of miners.Since the Beacon Chain went live, there has been plenty of infrastructure built to support it. Obol Network is building a “multi-operator validator network”, Lido and other service providers have been offering liquid staking tokens, and Rocket Pool—a decentralized staking service—finally went live on mainnet.There is much more to cover, but December's most exciting Eth2 news concerns the Kintsugi testnet, which went live on Dec 16th. This is the first significant public Merge testnet, and if all goes well, we should expect to see some final testnets around February/March of 2022.