Ethereum’s upgrade to ETH 2.0 has been one of the most anticipated upgrades in the crypto space. Although scheduled to go completely live in 2022, the market remains abuzz with the possibilities this upgrade will bring with it. There are going to be a number of upgrades that will culminate in the final upgrade in 2022. One of those is the Altair upgrade. Altair is the first upgrade to be carried out on the Beacon Chain and will fix major issues being experienced with the network.
The upgrade is scheduled to be carried out on October 27th at 10:56:23 am UTC. Ethereum devs are able to give a precise time and block that the upgrade will go live due to proof of stake. This upgrade will happen on epoch 74240. The mainnet upgrade pushes the network one step closer to ETH 2.0 becoming a reality. With ETH 2.0 comes proof of stake mining for the network. Bringing with it decreased energy consumption and more effective mining practices that do not require supercomputers.
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The project which has experienced numerous delays these past years finally looks to be on track. Prior to this, EIP-1559 had been launched with only a slight delay and this time, the Altair upgrade has arrived right on time. This upgrade will also implement “punitive params” described in the EIP-2982, as well as providing client support on the blockchain.
“This upgrade brings light-client support to the core consensus, cleans up beacon state incentive accounting, fixes some issues with validator incentives, and steps up the punitive params as per EIP-2982.”
ETH price falls to $2,800 following Altair upgrade | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView.com
Ethereum Community Gearing Up For ETH 2.0
One of the features that came out ahead of the move to ETH 2.0 was staking. With proof of stake, holders can stake their ETH to become validators and earn a reward for providing confirmations needed for transactions. In only the first three days after staking was announced, over 1 million ETH had been staked. This number had continued to grow in 2021.
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Currently, the number of ETH staked now sits at 8.7 million ETH, representing over 6.5% of the total Ethereum supply currently staked. The number o validators have now surpassed 240,000 on the network. Investors have taken to staking as a method of earning passive income thanks to the yearly returns on their staked coins, which will be released once the final upgrade on the Ethereum network is done in 2022.
Right now, the Ethereum network is, to say the least, overcrowded due to the rise of DeFi. This has caused network fees to skyrocket because of high network demand. But with the release of ETH 2.0, the blockchain will be more scalable and this scalability will lead to cheaper fees in the long term.
Featured image from Coin News, chart from TradingView.com
