Over 3% of Ethereum’s supply is now locked up in the ETH 2 deposit contract

Over 3% of Ethereum’s supply is now locked up in the ETH 2 deposit contract. At a price of $1850 per ETH, this now amounts to over $6.37 billion worth of ETH locked in.

In fact, the chain has over 107,000 active validators adding roughly around 670 new ones each day – essentially putting most skeptics, who worried that the chain would not see any real traction, to rest.

As ETH 2 continues to progress toward scalability, the price of the ETH also recovered above $1,800 earlier today.

Source: Coinstats

“Many of us look at a rising ETH price as a signal from the market that they value the fundamentals of the Ethereum network and are finally “pricing it in”, said popular Ethereum proponent Anthony Sassano in his latest blog.

According to him, the next major thing that Ethereum community will be celebrating in a big way is deployment and adoption of various layer 2 solutions like Optimism, Arbitrum, and Immutable X. He added:

“We’ll soon be able to monitor how much ETH is being burned once EIP-1559 is deployed – very exciting times ahead!”

These updates have a scheduled launch date – the most recent update being Ethereum’s Berlin upgrade, which is expected to go live on April 14, 2021.

According to a blog from Ethereum developer Tim Beiko, after months of planning, Berlin upgrade is ready to go live on the Ethereum mainnet at block 12,244,000. Berlin upgrade also introduces four EIPs to the Ethereum network.

The decentralized nature of blockchain systems makes a network upgrade more difficult, noted the developer, who also stated that “network upgrades in a blockchain require cooperation and communication with the community, as well as with the developers of the various Ethereum clients in order for the transition to go smoothly.”

Node operators and miners will be required to download the latest version of their client in order to participate in the latest version of the network.