1% of ETH in the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract
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1% of all existing ETH tokens are locked in the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract.
This was revealed by Vitalik Buterin on Twitter, sharing some statistics about the deposit contract.
1% of all ETH is now in the deposit contract!
Updated stats; the decentralization numbers are a bit worse than last time but only because they now properly treat Bitcoin Suisse with their multiple addresses as a single unit. Still doing far better than I expected! pic.twitter.com/B0ck5YGTUk
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 6, 2020
In fact, over 1.1 million ETH are currently held on the smart contract 0x00000000219ab540356cbb839cbe05303d7705fa, while the circulating supply is about 113 million. Therefore, more or less 1% of all ETH created to date are currently locked and stored on the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract.
The vast majority of those who have deposited ETH on this smart contract have paid the minimum, i.e. 32, but the majority of ETH that are currently deposited belong to owners who have paid more than 4,096, i.e. more than two million dollars each.
The race to deposit ETH on the deposit contract
The number of people who deposited ETH on the deposit contract has seen a real surge in the days leading up to December 1st, and has continued to grow since then, albeit to a lesser extent.
The curve of total ETH deposited followed the same trend.
The fact that in the days leading up to the launch of the Beacon Chain there was a real rush to deposit does not raise any particular questions, but the fact that even in the days following the launch of the Beacon Chain the deposits continued to grow shows that ETH owners who decide to stake them, for example with a view to setting up their own node in the new PoS-based chain, are also clearly increasing.
In other words, it seems that staking, made possible by the Proof-of-Stake adopted on the Beacon Chain, is enjoying increasing success, so much so that Vitalik himself commented:
“Still doing far better than I expected!”.
In fact, there were no particular problems or difficulties in the launch of phase zero of Ethereum 2.0, despite the fact that it was a very delicate step and not entirely without risks. Therefore the possible doubts about it are slowly dissipating, eliminating a lot of hesitation on the part of ETH owners towards the participation in the staking, which involves the locking of tokens on the deposit contract. However, it should be added that it is always possible to freely withdraw ETH deposited on this smart contract.
Finally, it is worth remembering that, for those who do not have at least 32 ETH, it is still possible to do staking using special third party services.
The post 1% of ETH in the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract appeared first on The Cryptonomist.
