Ethereum 2.0 launch has been touted to be one of the most drastic changes ever made to the blockchain network, as the second-largest asset would move from its current version of Proof-of-Work to the Proof-of-Stake system.
In a recent interview, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin confirmed that the implementation of their test net in the last few days has been a success as the 32 ETH node has gone from 32 ETH to 32.01 ETH in the last three days. He stated,
“This is just the culmination of more than two years of, uh, the research and development and a lot of hard work by all the different client teams. And it seems like it’s been running stable.”
The importance of Zero-Knowledge Proofs or ZKPs has been highlighted in the past by Buterin and their development is likely to be imminent. Zero proof transactions are useful to users who want to remain anonymous in space. Buterin stated that in terms of privacy and scalability, ZKP’s is a big positive since it needs to verify a really small proof instead of verifying something large. He stated,
“You can use them to verify the validity of things, you could potentially use them to replace Merkle trees; cut the Merkle tree branches and witnesses down from hundreds of kilobytes to like a couple of kilobytes, and all of these nice things.”
When asked how he planned to “sell” ETH 2.0 to the crypto ecosystem, Buterin said he didn’t pay much attention to it until he was sure that people could use it for something concrete. He thought it would be better not to start marketing right away until there was a real presence of a running network and running technology in the industry.
ETH 2.0 Testnet attracts a high number of validators
With Ethereum’s increasing price it has been observed that ETH‘s ecosystem has registered a surge in network activity over the past few weeks. According to Glassnode, the number of active addresses with a holding balance of more than 32 ETH has increased by 16 percent since the start of January, rising up to116,505 at press time.
The significance of this data is that, in order to become a validator on Ethereum 2.0, it is imperative for a holder to require to maintain a minimum balance of 32 Ether. Hence, the rise in the number of addresses with 32 ETH balance could possibly indicate that has been a rise in validators in the network.
According to Etherscan, the current number of validators on Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain Explorer (Phase 0) is up to 22947 at the time of writing.