Ethereum 2.0 Staking Contract Now Has 5 Million ETH
Ethereum 2.0, the network upgrade of ETH, now has more than 5 million Ethereum under its deposit contract, which is the highest level on record.
According to the latest data published by ETH tracking platform, Etherscan, the total value of the staked Ethereum under the staking contract of ETH 2.0 stands at around $14 billion in value. Ethereum 2.0 started its journey officially in December 2020 with the launch of Beacon Chain. ETH community fully supported the network upgrade and staked more than 1 million ETH within the first week of December 2020.
Looking Forward to Meeting You at iFX EXPO Dubai May 2021 – Making It Happen!
The world’s second-largest digital currency has seen a volatile month after the price of Ethereum touched an all-time high of nearly $4,350 on 12 May and reached a low of approximately $1,800 on 23 May. As of writing, ETH is trading near $2,700 with a market cap of over $310 billion. Despite the latest dip, ETH is still up by more than 250% since the start of 2021.
Suggested articles Earn Passive Income with Nhash Cloud Mining ServicesGo to article »
The recent surge in the price of ETH has accelerated whale movements. Earlier this week, crypto analytics platform Santiment highlighted a surge in whale ETH movements amid market volatility. “The amount of Ethereum whale transactions (greater than $100,000 in value) ballooned to levels not seen since January 2018 this week. After hitting an All-Time High of $4,358 just 9 days ago, ETH dropped to $2,015 (a -53.8% slide) in just one week,” Santiment tweeted.
Ethereum Supply
According to the latest data published by Glassnode, Smart Contracts hold nearly 23% of the total Ethereum supply. The growing popularity of NFTs and DeFi products has increased the demand for the world’s second-largest digital currency. One of the biggest issues with the current ETH network is its rising gas fees. Vitalik Buterin, the Co-Founder of Ethereum, recently highlighted the importance of ETH 2.0 to resolve issues in the ETH network.
Due to the latest surge in Ethereum, the total value of Vitalik Buterin’s public ETH holdings reached the level of $1 billion.
Keep an eye on these 5 Ethereum alternatives
5 min read
By Anastasia Chernikova
In 2013, software engineer Vitalik Buterin proposed that blockchain, the technology that underlies cryptocurrencies, can be used to support not only finance but all sorts of decentralized applications. Buterin’s idea became the basis of Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency and the “world computer,” a platform for running applications without the need for centralized servers.
From social networking to collectible cards, news publishing, and virtual reality games, the Ethereum blockchain powers all sorts of decentralized apps (dapps) today. But as the first blockchain of its kind, Ethereum is not a perfect platform. It suffers from high energy consumption, slow transaction speeds, and high transaction costs. It also suffered from scalability issues, which means transactions and applications become slower as more and more users are added to Ethereum.
In recent years, several other blockchains have emerged that provide platforms for exchanging monetary value and running applications while addressing the shortcomings of Ethereum. Here are five Ethereum alternatives that have great potential and are worth watching in the next few years.
Free TON
Free TON is a high-performance, scalable, and secure blockchain platform with a throughput of millions of transactions per second. It is a spin-off from the Telegram Open Network (TON) project, the original plan of messaging platform Telegram to move its application to its own blockchain.
Free TON runs on multiple blockchains, which gives it the power to speed millions of transactions. The platform supports the development of services and applications for a wide range of sectors, from government bodies to private companies and individual users.
Unlike Ethereum, Free TON is not run and maintained by a centralized organization. It is supported by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), a community of diverse parties that use smart contracts to vote and approve changes and directions of the project.
Free TON’s currency is the TON Crystal. Among the key features of the TON Crystal are its fast speed and very small transaction fees. TON users will be able to make transactions for less than $0.01 in fees and pay less than $0.05 per coin exchange transaction (swaps). Free TON also uses the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism to approve and register new transactions on its blockchain, which is much more energy-efficient and environment-friendly than the compute-heavy proof-of-work consensus used in Ethereum and Bitcoin.
Polkadot
Polkadot is a multi-chain network that joins various blockchains together, which is why it is known as the “blockchain of blockchains.” It acts as a framework that makes it easy for developers to create dapps and smart contracts for various blockchains and cryptocurrencies without worrying about the underlying mechanisms that connect them together.
DOT is Polkadot’s cryptocurrency. Aside from its monetary value, DOT allows holders to vote on potential code changes, which then automatically upgrade across the network if a consensus is reached. Like Free TON, DOT uses the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism to verify and approve new transactions.
Since its launch in 2020, Polkadot has climbed to become among the top-ten cryptocurrencies with over $40 billion in market cap and $14 million in 24-hour trading volume. The Polkadot multi-chain already hosts more than 430 projects with more being added every day. And despite being young, it has already been endorsed and listed on several top exchanges. Polkadot also hosts its own decentralized exchange (DEX) platform, Polkastarter.
Cosmos
Cosmos aims to be an “internet of blockchains.” Like Polkadot, Cosmos’s vision is not to have a “blockchain to rule them all” but to have a constellation of blockchains that can coexist and interoperate (hence the name Cosmos). Cosmos has a streamlined model that allows developers to create their own blockchains in a short time. To show the power of the system, the creators of Cosmos used the platform to create an Ethereum clone called Ethermint, which not only supports smart contracts and dapps, but is also compatible with the original Ethereum.
Cosmos is composed of three components. Tendermint is a consensus mechanism that allows developers to create proof-of-stake protocols that are scalable, fast, and secure. The Cosmos SDK is the programming platform that allows developers to build their own blockchains on Tendermint. And the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC) is the system that enables different blockchains to communicate with each other.
The native cryptocurrency of the Cosmos network is ATOM. ATOMs give their holder the ability to stake and validate blocks, vote on governance issues, and pay for transaction fees.
EOS
EOS launched in 2019 as a direct competitor to Ethereum. The developers and supporters of EOS market it as “Ethereum for big business” and say it is meant to solve the problems of scale and usability that developers face when building applications on top of the Ethereum blockchain.
Like Ethereum, EOS supports dapps and smart contracts. However, the blockchain outperforms Ethereum in terms of execution and transaction speed.
EOS is owned by the company block.one. Among its developers is Daniel Larimer, who is a veteran of other blockchain projects (BitShares and Steemit) and has allegedly been in touch with Nakamoto in the early days of bitcoin.
EOS’s cryptocurrency is the EOS Token, which is used to exchange value on the EOS blockchain. It is currently among the top-20 most valuable cryptocurrencies. EOS also has an operating system, EOS.IO, which manages and controls dapps and smart contracts on the EOS blockchain. Developers must hold EOS Tokens to be eligible to use network resources and run apps on the blockchain. EOS supports between 10,000 and 100,000 transactions per second, which is why it presents itself as a suitable platform for large-scale businesses.
EOS uses the “delegated proof-of-stake” consensus mechanism, in which token holders elect a limited number of voters to maintain transactions and updates to the EOS blockchain.
Cardano
Cardano is another blockchain that, like Ethereum, is meant to run decentralized applications. Among the key features of Cardano are speed and scalability.
Cardano is developed by three organizations: IOHK, Cardano Foundation, and EMURGO. IOHK is doing the bulk of the engineering effort, and one of the key characteristics that set it apart from other blockchain development teams is its devotion to scientific methods. IOHK works with academic researchers across the globe to peer-review and vet updates before deploying them on the platform. Among Cardano’s founders is Charles Hoskinson, one of the co-founders of Ethereum.
Cardano has already established several robust applications on its blockchain in the banking, identity management, retail, supply chain, and education sectors.
Cardano’s cryptocurrency is ADA, which is supported by the environment-friendly proof-of-stake consensus algorithm and is currently among the top-20 most valuable cryptocurrencies.
Some closing thoughts
While cryptocurrencies and blockchains are still in their infancy in comparison to fiat currencies and centralized banks, they hold a lot of promise and can be the future of money and computing. The landscape is still diverse and fragmented, and not all existing solutions will make it to the finish line. Utility, scale, speed, and community adoption are four key traits to look out for when examining blockchains and cryptocurrencies.
About the author
Anastasia (Nastya) Chernikova is a tech journalist whose articles have been featured in Forbes and Esquire in Russia, Business Insider, Inc.com, and other publications. She has interviewed prominent tech founders, such as WhatsApp founder Jan Koum right after Facebook bought his app for $19 billion, and Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum founder, when his cryptocurrency ether was just in the beginning of its triumph. She is keen on the idea of the decentralized world and what the blockchain brings to the financial system.
Latest Ethereum price and analysis (ETH to USD)
Ethereum is currently trading at $2,639 after bouncing significantly from its weekend lows of $1,735.
The industry’s second largest asset by market cap is still seething following a sensational blow-off top at $4,400 following months of continuous price action to the upside.
Ethereum lost more than 60% of its value in just 12 days, coinciding with a chaotic fall in the price of Bitcoin, which ended its uptrend with a plunge to below $30,000.
Analysts remain cautious on cryptocurrencies as a whole following the drop, with it seeming as though the 2020 to 2021 bull run has now met its demise.
ETHUSD chart by TradingView
Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are now in a downtrend on all higher time frames following a series of lower highs and lower lows.
This does not mean that a prolonged bounce to the upside is off the cards, in fact Ethereum is quite likely to test higher before printing a macro lower high to confirm the arrival in a bear market.
Ethereum could rally to as high as $3,400 before rejecting, which would present an opportunity to form a new lower low at $1,550 during the next crash.
It’s worth noting that Ethereum has still enjoyed a tremendous year in terms of price action, rallying from below $1,000 at the turn of the year to $4,400, but it is now expected to enter a prolonged downtrend with price targets beginning to emerge back below the $1,000 level of support.
For more news, guides and cryptocurrency analysis, click here.
About Ethereum
Ethereum was launched by Vitalik Buterin on July 30 2015. He was a researcher and programmer working on Bitcoin Magazine and he initially wrote a whitepaper in 2013 describing Ethereum.
Buterin had proposed that Bitcoin needed a scripting language. He decided to develop a new platform with a more general scripting language when he couldn’t get buy in to his proposal.
More Ethereum news and information
If you want to find out more information about Ethereum or cryptocurrencies in general, then use the search box at the top of this page. Please check the below article:
Story continues
As with any investment, it pays to do some homework before you part with your money. The prices of cryptocurrencies are volatile and go up and down quickly. This page is not recommending a particular currency or whether you should invest or not.
You may be interested in our range of cryptocurrency guides along with the latest cryptocurrency news.