Get the weekly summary of crypto market analysis, news, and forecasts! This Week’s Summary The crypto market ends the week at a total market capitalization of $1,165 trillion. Bitcoin is up by over 2% after a rollercoaster of a week. Ethereum decreased by almost 1% over the past seven days. XRP gained more than 15% in value this week. Almost all altcoins are trading in the green, with very few exceptions. The DeFi sector decreased the total value of protocols…
Ethereum 2.0 Deposits Hits 2 Million As ETH Price Hits 2-Year High
Data from Dune Analytics reveals that there is currently 2million ETH locked into the ETH 2.0 contract. This shows the increased confidence in the Ethereum 2.0 update currently under development.
Ethereum 2.0 a major update
In general, the crypto community has been surprised to observe the levels of participation in Ethereum 2.0. It is worth remembering that Ethereum 2.0 aims to improve the ETH Blockchain in speed and usability. Recall that, currently, the Ethereum Blockchain suffers multiple bottlenecks that raise transaction fees.
This is one of the reasons why the crypto community highly anticipates the Ethereum 2.0 update. The beacon phase that launched in December has ushered in a steady migration to the new mainnet. Fragmentation is expected to occur in 2021, where the Ethereum Blockchain will be divided into 64 proposed chunks and will work alongside the Beacon Chain.
With this second phase, network performance will be improved, and the computational load reduced. The third and final phase will be the merger and is scheduled for 2022, at which time Beacon Chai and ETH 1 will merge. ETH2 Beacon Chain will become the Ethereum Blockchain, while ETH1 will be another additional chunk. It will be with this last phase that Ethereum will see a significant improvement in its scalability. Also, mining will no longer be necessary at this point.
The staking of over 2 million ETH in the smart deposit contract is a major indicator that sentiments are high on the project. At the moment, everything is going according to plan, and no delays are expected. However, 2021 will be an interesting year.
Ethereum Hits 2-year high.
Ethereum has also enjoyed a major bullish run in the past 24hours. The leading altcoin started the day as low as $624 before making a bullish, culminating in the coin surpassing $700. This was an important milestone as ETH had not reached this mark since 2018, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
Following this milestone, ETH price corrected and is currently trading for $688. Ethereum has been able to recover in recent months and has enjoyed increased use in 2020. The rise of DeFi was a major boost for the smart contract network. More than 80% of DeFi products are built on Ethereum, resulting in more users of ETH.
$600 remains a key support level for Ether, and a massive bullish run could take the coin to around $750 in the coming days.