Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain was launched a week back. Since the ambitious roll-out, the balance of ETH in the deposit contract has kept on rolling in. This was revealed by the blockchain technology intelligence platform, Glassnode.
As the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract continued to accumulate ETH, the total value staked climbed up to nearly 1.3 million ETH which happens to be around 250% of the phase 0 target. Initially, the contract required around 500,000 ETH to secure network operations, but the number has been on a rise. On the 8th of December alone, more than 81,500 ETH were deposited to the contract.
In addition, the number of blocks and epochs finalized on the network has also risen significantly. This has been positive for the amount of rewards validators accrue daily
This essentially meant that a lot more than 1% of the total circulating supply of ETH is locked into securing the new Proof-of-Stake [PoS] network. However, there is a catch. The deposited funds cannot be moved until the ether devs activate a two-way bridge between the current Ethereum blockchain and Ethreum 2.0.
All that a user can do is to validate on Ethereum 2.0 which involves proposing new blocks and attesting to blocks that other validators have proposed. With each process, the validators earn incentives which are then added to their staked ETH.
Furthermore, it is important to note that the deposit contract has been receiving more of the crypto-asset than it is allowed to allot to new nodes per day. In the current scenario, there is a cap placed with regards to the number of validators that can be added each day to Ethereum 2.0 with the upper limit being 900 validators each holding 32 ETH each.
Meaning, just 28.8K new ETH that is being deposited will be deployed in the creation of new nodes while all other coins will have to queue up until a new daily limit is alloted.