The Ethereum protocol has reached another milestone as the number of Ethereum 2.0 validators has surpassed 300,000. At the time of writing, the Ethereum 2.0 contract has over 9.6 million ether deposited worth more than $28.4 billion.
Ethereum Beacon Chain validators cross 300,000 mark
For some time now, participants in the Ethereum (ETH) network have been preparing to move from a proof-of-work (PoW) system to a protocol that relies solely on the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm.
The Ethereum community has been running a parallel system that leverages PoW and PoS via the Beacon chain and eventually PoW will be phased out. Ethereum’s (ETH) value increased 107% year to date and ether is up 14.1% during the last two weeks. The cost to become a validator today is 32 ether or $94,400 using current ETH exchange rates.
The number of Ethereum 2.0 validators has just passed a milestone from 300,000 to 300,702 validators as of February 28. Since the first of the year, the number of validators has increased by 9.11%, from 275,594 validators. Currently, the Ethereum 2.0 smart contract holds 9.68 million Ether deposits worth over $28.4 billion today. Deposits are added regularly each day in the deposit contract in exact amounts of 32 ether per deposit.
The Beacon chain was launched in December 2020 during Ethereum’s Serenity upgrade and there are two different types of validators called proposers and attestors. While proposers bolster the minting of new blocks, an attestor validates the block’s transactions. Rather than pools of miners getting ethereum block rewards, validators are rewarded for staking via the Beacon chain.
Ethereum Hashrate Hits Record Highs, Arrow Glacier Delays Mining Difficulty Bomb
Currently, Ethereum mining pools are operating at the highest levels over the lifetime of the Ethereum network. The global Ethereum hashrate today is 1.08 petahash per second (PH/s) or 1,082,043,832,616,262 hashes per second (H/s). Hashrate calculations are derived by taking advantage of the average ether block time and network mining difficulty.
While the number of deposits and ETH validators grow, no one is certain about exactly when the full transition to a PoS-based Ethereum 2.0 system will happen. In December 2021, the Arrow Glacier delay the mining difficulty bomb, which would have made it so miners could not mine via PoW. The difficulty bomb or motivated transition to PoS was delayed until June 2022.
