29th October 2021 > > ETH 2.0.

tl;dr

ETH 2.0 gets ever closer.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

After nearly a whole day sitting around $59k, BTC now looks comfortable with a strong base in the low 60s. It was two weeks ago now that we breached $60k for the first time since May 2021 as enthusiasm was built before the launch of ProShares futures-based ETF.

Though excitement about that event has rightly dwindled, there has not been any danger of a strong correction downwards.

This has been accompanied by ever-dwindling stock of BTC on centralised exchanges, suggesting that holders are losing appetite to sell coins, putting upward pressure on prices.

CryptoQuant also reports that the Miners Position Index (MPI), which measures the ratio of BTC leaving all miners' wallets to its 1-year moving average, has been trading below zero since March 6, 2021, suggesting strong accumulation among miners. This again puts upward pressure on prices.

But the world is always in a state of constant flux. Both trends will undoubtedly reverse at some point in the future.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – ETH 2.0 is getting closer

Quick recap if I may.

ETH is moving from a proof-of-work (POW) to proof-of-stake (POS), with the objective of dramatically reducing energy consumption by the order of 99%+ I believe. A key benefit of this change for the user is a reduction in fees, some of which have been insanely high at times on the Ethereum network.

Insanely high is no exaggeration when a simple transfer can cost tens of dollars, minting an NFT hundreds of dollars, and executing a smart contract has been priced in the thousands of dollars.

The POS network – known as the Beacon Chain – has been live for nearly a year now but has not been used except for some test transactions.

The Beacon Chain also heralds the concept of sharding, which is a Layer 2 type solution embedded within the Ethereum ecosystem. The basic concept is that each shard will process its own set of transactions before submitting a summary position back to the main chain.

Sharding will allow for far greater transactions per second, allowing Ethereum to compete better with the fastest blockchain networks.

…

There has been a recent upgrade to the Beacon Chain, known as Altair. It introduces some minor changes to the code, which need not concern us here. The key point is that the upgrade was executed without a hitch, reinforcing belief and confidence in the Beacon Chain.

ETH 2.0 will be realised when the current ETH blockchain is combined with Beacon Chain, an event now known as “The Merge” followed by the implementation of sharding.

Rather excitingly, this is now expected to happen in Q1 or Q2 2022.

ETH 2.0 will provide a huge impetus to Decentralised Finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that use Ethereum as their network.