PoS

ETH 2.0 Contract Exceeds 7.4 Million Ether, Close to $30 Billion Locked, Liquid Staking Pools Grow

06/09/2021 by Idelto Editor

The Ethereum 2.0 contract now has more than 7.4 million ether worth over $29.3 billion using today’s ether exchange rates. According to statistics, the smart contract address is the largest holder of ethereum out of all the wallets in existence.

Ethereum 2.0 Contract Nears $30 Billion

In the early days, the Ethereum (ETH) protocol was a 100% proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain but in more recent times, Ethereum is now a mix of proof-of-stake (PoS) and PoW. In time, the digital currency and smart contract network will be 100% PoS and this will be the main consensus algorithm that keeps Ethereum chugging along.

On November 6, 2020, Bitcoin.com News reported on the co-creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, adding $1.4 million worth of ether into the Phase 0 smart contract. Since then, the ETH 2.0 contract has swelled significantly. In July 2021, Bitcoin.com News reported on the Ethereum 2.0 contract exceeding six million ether. At the time on July 2, the six million ether was worth $12.4 billion using exchange rates from that day.

Today, according to Etherscan statistics, the Eth2 Deposit Contract holds 7,489,474 ether worth $29,366,901,606. The smart contract address is the largest wallet among the Ethereum rich list of wallets. The Wrapped Ether smart contract address is fairly close, however, with 6.9 million ether.

Ever since Buterin deposited the massive amount of ether he held into the ETH 2.0 contract address, deposits of 32 ETH are continuously deposited to this very day. In order to be a validator, 32 ether is required to join the ETH 2.0 staking community.

Behind the ETH 2.0 contract and Wrapped Ether wallet, includes wallets owned by Binance, Kraken, Gemini, Huobi, FTX exchange, and a few unknown ether billionaires. The ETH 2.0 smart contract has seen 150,980 transactions to date and the 7.4 million ether equals 6.37% of the entire circulating supply of ether.

1.3 Million Ether Is Locked in Liquid Staking Pools

A lot of the ETH 2.0 money locked in to the contract is being staked in prominent staking pools like Lido, Stkr, SharedStake, Stafi, Stakewise, Cream and Stakehound. These pool services have approximately 1,361,463 ether locked and Lido has the lion’s share of ether.

The Lido liquid staking pool has around 1,167,007 ether staking today, according to Dune Analytics stats. $5.35 billion of the overall $29.3 billion locked is being staked by large pools and that’s about 18.09% of the 7.4 million ether today.

In addition to the 7.4 million ether locked, to date, 216,229 ether has been burned after EIP-1559 was implemented. Using today’s exchange rates, that’s $729 million worth of the second-leading crypto asset by market capitalization.

What do you think about the 7.4 million in ether worth more than $29 billion locked into the Ethereum 2.0 contract? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Ethereum Community Gears up for the Long-Awaited London Fork Set to Go Live on August 5

04/08/2021 by Idelto Editor

The Ethereum community has been gearing up for the highly anticipated London Network Upgrade which should take place on August 5 around 2:00 p.m. (EDT). Node operators have been asked to upgrade their nodes as soon as possible, as the upgrade is scheduled to take place at block height 12,965,000.

Ethereum Set to Fork on Thursday, Blockchain Will See 5 Improvements

According to the countdown clock hosted on etherscan.io, the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain will be upgraded in the near future, on or around Thursday afternoon. Previously, Bitcoin.com News reported on the London upgrade on July 9, 2021, and at the time it was estimated block 12,965,000 would fall on or around August 4.

According to Ethernodes data, as of 16:20 Beijing time, 65.6% of the nodes are ready for the Ethereum London hard fork, and the remaining 34.3% will be upgraded within 2-3 days. pic.twitter.com/BXIl67LIeh

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) August 3, 2021

The “London Mainnet Announcement” was revealed by Tim Beiko when the developer wrote a summary about the upgrade via the official Ethereum blog.

Man, I’m so ready for Ethereum 2.0.

I was literally talking about it since before Eth even launched.

I don’t believe most people truly understand how game-changing Serenity will be— Dapps like @AugurProject will be 100x more efficient and usable.

So excited.

— Jeremy Gardner (@Disruptepreneur) August 4, 2021

With the countdown clock ticking down, the Ethereum fork should take place on Thursday on or around 2:00 p.m. (EDT), depending on how long it takes to process more than 5,000 ETH blocks. The London hard fork includes a total of five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). The EIPs included in tomorrow upgrade include:

EIP-1559: Fee market change for ETH 1.0 chain
EIP-3198: BASEFEE opcode
EIP-3529: Reduction in refunds
EIP-3541: Reject new contracts starting with the 0xEF byte
EIP-3554: Difficulty Bomb Delay to December 1st 2021

Ethereum Markets See a Streak of Daily Gains

Prior to the upgrade, ETH has managed to jump over 8% in value on August 4, and weekly statistics show ETH is up over 15% on Wednesday. 30-day statistics show ethereum (ETH) has gained 21% but the crypto asset is only up 10% during the trailing 90 days. Ethereum prices have managed to gather well over a week of daily gains prior to the fork.

Probability that Ethereum’s London upgrade (including EIP 1559) goes off flawlessly?

— John W. 🇮🇪🇺🇸🇪🇸🇪🇺 (@_JohnWhelan) August 2, 2021

When the community discusses the London hard fork, usually it is said that the most significant changes added to the blockchain will include EIP-1559 and EIP-3554. EIP-1559 will change Ethereum’s fee rate to a new scheme that makes the crypto asset ether deflationary. While EIP-3554 adjusts the Ethereum miner difficulty bomb to ease the transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS).

On Thursday there will be an Ethereum London Upgrade community call and an Ethstaker live watch call as well.

What do you think about the upcoming Ethereum London Upgrade? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Vitalik Buterin Says People Difficulties Not Technical Difficulties Slowed the Ethereum 2.0 Rollout

03/06/2021 by Idelto Editor

The cofounder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, recently discussed the highly anticipated full transition from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus model to proof-of-stake (PoS) as its replacement. Buterin admitted at Hong Kong’s Startmeup HK 2021 Festival that the transition was taking too long and highlighted that it wasn’t technical problems but “related to people.”

Buterin: ‘If You Build a Team, It Is Important to Know Who You Are Working With

Vitalik Buterin has discussed the anticipated Ethereum 2.0 transition during the Startmeup HK 2021 Festival in Hong Kong this past week. The Ethereum cofounder detailed that he understood the changes were taking a long time and said that it was mostly people deterring the improvements.

“One of the biggest problems I’ve found with our project is not the technical problems, it’s problems related with people,” Buterin said during his interview with Forkast news. “Ethereum is now in a better economic position, but it took us five years to get to where we are now. We have a lot of internal team conflicts in these five years. If you are building a team, it is important to know who you are working with.”

When Buterin was asked about Ethereum 2.0, he said that the developers have been calling it by that name less and less these days.

“We actually call it Ethereum 2.0 a bit less because we want to emphasize that, this isn’t throwing out the existing Ethereum platform and making a totally new one. It’s a much more kind of incremental set of changes,” the programmer remarked.

Scalability and Proof-of-Stake Are Important Says Ethereum Cofounder

Buterin further said that sharding and rollups would greatly improve the scalability of Ethereum by a factor of 50 to 100. “The two of them stack on top of each other so once you have rollups and sharding, Ethereum and things on top of Ethereum will actually be able to have the kind of scalability that the large scale enterprise applications are expecting,” Buterin told the video host.

Buterin then explained that there’s a lot of people building and said that the transition to PoS will be important going forward. Buterin stressed:

There’s a lot of other things that people are building in the Ethereum space, but the blockchain’s ability to handle all the transactions is having a hard time keeping up with the demand, which is exactly why all of these things that we’re working on the technology side with scalability and proof of stake are so important.

During the end of the interview, Buterin’s conversation grazed up on decentralized finance (defi) and the non-fungible token (NFT) space. The Ethereum cofounder expects the defi ecosystem to continue evolving, and he sees some unique applications coming in the future.

“The functionality and programmability that crypto and defi provides could eventually provide the tools to do a lot of much more interesting things,” Buterin noted.

What do you think about Buterin’s statements about people difficulties rather than technical difficulties concerning the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

US Convenience Store Chain Sheetz to Accept Cryptocurrencies for Payments

28/05/2021 by Idelto Editor

The American chain of convenience stores and coffee shops, Sheetz, announced on Thursday that the firm would be accepting digital currencies like bitcoin, ether, and dogecoin for payments. The major Mid-Atlantic chain’s executive payments manager says accepting crypto-asset acceptance bolsters Sheetz’s mission to provide customers with the “ultimate one-stop-shop.”

Convenience Store Chain Sheetz Adds Digital Currency Payments, Fuel Pump Crypto Payments to Roll out This Summer

On May 27, Sheetz revealed the company will be accepting crypto payments via the digital payments network Flexa. The company, headquartered in Altoona, Pennsylvania, operates 622 convenience stores and coffee shops in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Maryland.

Sheetz noted in its announcement that the firm aims to “provide customers with the ability to pay for items inside the store or fill up their cars, trucks, and RVs at the pump using digital currencies like bitcoin, ether, litecoin, dogecoin, and more.”

“Above all else, our mission at Sheetz is to continue providing our customers with the ultimate one-stop-shop where they can refuel their car and refresh their body,” Linda Smith, the payments manager for Sheetz said. The Sheetz executive further added:

As a result, we are constantly innovating and exploring new offerings to truly give our customers what they want, when they want it, 24/7/365 — that includes accepting many forms of payment. We’re very excited to be working with Flexa to roll out support for cryptocurrencies and other types of digital assets at our stores.

Sheetz Leverages NCR payment gateway for Crypto Point-of-Sale

According to the announcement, Sheetz will leverage Flexa’s “climate-neutral payments technology” at a number of select cafes and stores at first. Later this summer, the company will roll out crypto payments for the firm’s fuel pumps. Sheetz customers can also tether their “Sheetz Rewardz” loyalty points to Flexa-enabled applications. Further, Sheetz is also leveraging Flexa’s point-of-sale (POS) partner NCR.

“Connecting through the existing POS solution to the NCR payment gateway enables retailers to quickly integrate new solutions making it easy to introduce new innovations enabled by digital currencies,” Tim Vanderham, the chief technology officer of NCR noted during the Sheetz crypto acceptance announcement. “Retailers benefit through increased loyalty, lower transaction fees, and reduced fraud while improving convenience and choice for shoppers,” Vanderham added.

Trevor Filter, the cofounder of the payments firm Flexa, detailed that his company looks forward to helping Sheetz roll out digital asset payments at the fuel pumps.

“Sheetz is one of the most forward-thinking brands in the business and understands their customer base better than anyone else. We’re absolutely elated that Flexa can help them become the first convenience and retail chain to accept digital currencies directly at the pump,” Filter remarked.

What do you think about Sheetz accepting digital currencies like bitcoin, ether, and dogecoin for payments? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

As Bitcoin Drops in Value, Proof-of-Stake Tokens That Use Less Energy See Double-Digit Gains

15/05/2021 by Idelto Editor

Crypto markets have been very volatile in recent times and a great number of digital assets have dropped more than 30% in value during the last three days. Although, not all the coins in the crypto economy are doing badly, as coins that do not leverage proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithms have actually done well after the recent Tesla controversy. Distributed ledgers that use delegated validation nodes and proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains have made double-digit gains in recent days.

Green Energy Gains: Cardano, Polkadot, and Polygon Shine

As soon as Elon Musk and Tesla sparked the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm controversy, a few blockchains that use less energy and alternative consensus algorithms have seen massive gains. For instance, cardano (ADA) tapped an all-time high at $2.37 per unit on Saturday.

ADA is up a whopping 4,362% against the U.S. dollar during the last 12 months. Seven-day stats show ADA has gained 40% and more than 18% during the last 24 hours. The Cardano network leverages proof-of-stake and the project is backed by the Ethereum cofounder Charles Hoskinson.

Meanwhile, XRP, which also does not use a PoW consensus algorithm, hasn’t gained massive percentages but has remained stable during the downturn. Ripple Labs cofounder Chris Larsen recently explained that BTC would lose its dominance if it didn’t address the energy problems just before Elon Musk stirred the controversy.

Polkadot (DOT) is also a proof-of-stake blockchain and it has remained profitable after Musk’s environmental concern statements. The PoS crypto-asset DOT has seen a 40% gain during the last seven days.

Crypto Industry’s First PoS Coin Comes Back to Life

Stellar (XLM) has done well, polygon (MATIC) is up 25% today, and dogecoin (DOGE) markets held steady because Musk recently said he was working with DOGE developers. The biggest gainers on Saturday include kicktoken (KICK +132%), stakenet (XSN +91%), origin sport (ORS +42%), and peercoin (PPC +40%).

In fact, the Peercoin project is the first PoS blockchain to pioneer distributed ledger systems without using massive energy. The token peercoin (PPC) was invoked in 2012 and the website calls it a “green cryptocurrency for a sustainable future.” For years now PPC floundered as an old and mostly forgotten PoS coin but since the recent concerns over PoW, the Peercoin project has made a strong comeback.

What do you think about all the PoS coins that are seeing gains because they don’t leverage PoW? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.