Ethereum Tops $600 on 2.0 Launch Day, But Scaling a Long Way Off

Ethereum prices have returned above $600 today along with the launching of the much-anticipated Beacon Chain, but high throughput on the new blockchain will take some time.

The big day has finally arrived and the genesis of Phase 0 will begin in two hour’s time from publication according to the countdown.

The Beacon Chain explorer also reports that almost 870,000 ETH has been deposited which is way over the required 524,000 that was needed for launch.

At today’s prices that works out at around $530 million.

Major exchanges such as Coinbase are already preparing to launch their staking services and make profits from simplifying the process for investors that do not want to take the manual approach. It’s likely that others such as Binance will soon follow suit.

Ethereum Wants to go Fast

Messari research has taken a deep dive into the launch to explain exactly what Beacon Chain will bring and what is still in the pipeline.

The brand new blockchain will run in tandem with ETH 1.0 and, as pointed out, will have little functionality initially as there will be no applications, transactions, or smart contracts executed on it for some time.

“When the Beacon Chain launches tomorrow, outside of bootstrapping a network of proof of stake validators, it will have little functionality.”

This will begin with Phase 1 which introduces sharding, or side chains, to take the load off the main chain and increase throughput. There will be 64 parallel shards but this phase is unlikely to be launched for another year.

However, Layer 2 solutions are becoming increasingly available for those that want faster and cheaper transactions on the current Ethereum network. The research pointed out that massive scaling will be capable, but not for quite a while;

“Rollups + “Phase 1.5” would amount to a ~10,000x+ improvement in network processing capacity over the current state of Ethereum.”

Sometime in 2022, Phase 1.5 will merge the two versions once Beacon Chain has a full set of proof-of-stake validators securing the network, and the chain has been subdivided into the 64 shards.

All of the smart contracts and transaction data from ETH 1.0 needs to be imported to one of the shards which is no simple feat.

Back Over $600

Ethereum prices have been buoyed by the impending Phase 0 genesis and have returned to reach resistance at $620.

A minor pullback dropped ETH prices back to $500 late last week but the asset quickly recovered and has again reached its highest price since June 2018.

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