ETH 2.0 Update: Staked Value of Ether Breaches $1 Billion Mark, Rising ETH Gas Price Raise Concerns

ETH 2.0, one of the most talked-about upgrades in the decentralized world has reached another milestone after the value of staked Ether surpassed $1 billion. The milestone came within the first 20 days of the Beacon Chain launch making the newly launched ETH 2.0 network the fourth largest staking network with over 1.5 million staked Ether.

ETH 2.0 is moving from a proof-of-work mining consensus to Proof-of-stake, promising high scaling capabilities with support for sharding. Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum has claimed that the fully operational ETH 2.0 network would have transaction processing capabilities on-par with mainstream centralized payment processing giants such as VISA and MasterCard.

The ETH 2.0 has a multi-year roll-out plan expected to commence in three phases with an approx 2-year timeline. The main capabilities and benefits of the ETH 2.0 network would be visible only after the complete roll-out, however, the crypto community seems highly bullish towards Ether as visible through on-chain metrics and soaring ETH price and staking services announcements by major exchanges such as Coinbase and Kraken.

Ethereum On-Chain Metrics Suggest Highly Bullish Sentiment

The number of daily unique addresses interacting with the network soared to a 2-month high suggesting the surging interest in the second-largest cryptocurrency. Ether price has also soared by over 17% in the past week, currently consolidating above $650. The ETH price also saw a major rally after CME announced they would be launching an Ether Future quite similar to its Bitcoin Futures in February next year.

???? While #Bitcoin got the majority of headlines the past few days, #Ethereum rather quietly posted its highest daily active address output in more than 2 months. Unsurprisingly, many $ETH-based projects have been rallying against $BTC ever since. https://t.co/U2LJTG3uXX pic.twitter.com/sAAP0xklnP

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) December 19, 2020

The number of active wallet addresses as well as addresses with a non-zero balance is on constant growth. The number of Ethereum addresses with a value between $1-$10 has surpassed the 15 million marks even surpassing Bitcoin on the metrics. The second-largest crypto-asset also has a better YTD return against Bitcoin.

Rising Gas Fee Comes Back to Haunt Ethereum Again

One of the main reasons for the launch of ETH 2.0 is to offer better transaction capabilities at negligible cost, as the current Ethereum network is jam-packed with growing Defi volumes combined with daily ETH transactions, making it clogged which in turn results in high Gas fees. A couple of months back the growing gas fee became a major concern for the Ethereum network resulting in several traders paying even higher gas fees than the transaction amount.

The rising gas-fee issue is back to haunt the Ethereum community again as several people complained about facing similar issues. One user posted a screenshot of his transaction where the network was asking for $43 in the gas fee. While the ETH 2.0 complete roll-out is at least 2 years away, the network might have to find a temporary solution to keep it in check.

Sorry $ETH but I'm not paying this gas fee ???? pic.twitter.com/iGLjdCSu8X

— $Linkara Crypto #❤️❤️❤️ #Celsians #SpaceMonkey (@LinkCrypto1) December 17, 2020