Ethereum 2.0 posts another milestone

Around 10 days before the scheduled London Hard Fork, Ethereum is celebrating another milestone: The Beacon Chain has already booked over 200,000 validator nodes. Ascending trend.

If one reads whitepapers of projects that sometimes more, sometimes less explicitly position themselves as “Ethereum Killers”, one could come to the conclusion that the smart contract king is already heading towards retirement. “Bitcoin was the first generation blockchain, Ethereum ushered in the second generation and our project is a 3rd generation blockchain. Want to take on the platform.


Advance praise: Eth2 cracks 200,000 validators

The steadily growing number of validators for Ethereum 2.0, for example, speaks for the fact that Ethereum is by no means scrapped. They have already invested considerable sums in securing Ethereum 2.0 and thus granted Eth2 a considerable leap of faith.

The Beacon Chain – Ethereum’s Proof of Stake Chain, which is currently running parallel to the main network – passed the 200,000 validator mark on July 26th. This is evident from the data from the blockchain explorer Beaconcha.in.

Ethereum 2.0: The number of validators is growing and growing. Source: Beaconcha.in

Because a minimum reserve of 32 ETH2 has to be deposited for the operation of validator nodes in ETH2, over 6.6 million ETH are already “locked” in the beacon chain. At the current Ether price of around USD 2,300, this corresponds to an equivalent of over USD 15 billion, which is already pegged into ETH2.


Ethereum: developer activity remains high

As far as the developer side is concerned, the signs are still pointing to growth. This is supported by the download figures for Ganache, an “Ethereum emulator” that can be used to build private Ethereum blockchains for test purposes.

Download numbers of the Ethereum CLI Ganache. Source: Trufflesuite.com

Since the beginning of the year, the downloads for ganache have increased significantly again. In the past three months, interest has not plummeted despite the sharp correction in the crypto market, on the contrary: between April and June alone, the number of downloads of ganache increased by 11 percent.

London Calling: Ethereum is heading for a hard fork

Of course, the network still has to overcome a few hurdles before the inauguration party of Ethereum 2.0. This includes the upcoming upgrade “London”, which will primarily give the network a new fee model. This is what the Ethereum improvement proposal looks like [Ethereum Improvement Proposal], EIP-1559 stipulates that part of the fees incurred in a transaction be destroyed. That could dramatically reduce the amount of ETH in circulation, as a simulation by Dune Analytics shows.

ETH more valuable than BTC?

According to this, a total of 2,915,119 ETH would have been burned in the past 365 days if EIP-1559 had already existed in this period. This results in the hypothetical figure of 8,720 ETH by which the total supply would have grown per day. That is significantly less than the average of 13,512 ETH that were actually “mined” per day. Some observers therefore assume that this throttling of the inflation rate of ether could boost its price. Some go so far as to regard ETH as a better store of value than Bitcoin in the long term. The London Hard Fork is expected to take place on August 4th at block height of 12,965,000.