Momentum is building up ahead of Ethereum’s transition to ETH 2.0. The Beacon Chain deposit contract has attracted more than $13.6 billion worth of ETH from over 190,000 validators. According to data on the Eth2 launchpad site, the number of Ethereum staked in the deposit contract is now more than 6.1 million ETH tokens. This represents a growth of over 1000 percent since the deposit contract went live in December 2020.
Bitcoin has come under a lot of fire lately for its high energy consumption levels. This has arguably fueled a series of crackdowns from regulators in several countries, particularly China. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum currently utilize a Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm, a scenario where miners use computational power to solve complex mathematical problems. The downside of this approach is that it requires a lot of power.
ETH 2.0 marks the transition of the Ethereum network to Proof-of-Stake consensus from its current PoW. The new version is expected to be more scalable, faster, and of course, consume lesser energy.
There has been a lot of hype around ETH 2.0, and this is evident in the growing number of tokens staked on the deposit contract. According to JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM), the excitement will likely propel the entire crypto staking sector to $40 billion by 2025.