As 2% of all ETH supply is now in the ETH 2.0 deposit contract, the total value staked is around 2.2 million $ETH.
Source: Crypto Quant
This shows immense confidence on part of the Ethereum community, as the price of the asset traded crossed $1200, rallying over 70% in the past week alone.
Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin recently commented on having such a clear sign of the community’s confidence in Ethereum by the amount of money in the deposit contract, stating people locking up $300 million dollars worth of their ether “potentially never to see it again” unless ETH 2.0 delivers.
“In some sense, it’s the ultimate bet on progress, and the bet on progress to some extent is what Ethereum is about”, says Buterin.
He goes on to state that Ethereum is going to become what the 2020s will expect a modern blockchain to be, explaining that sharding along with the Layer 2 ecosystem together will give Ethereum scalability in the tens of thousands of transactions per second.
He calls this ‘hugely important’ as ultimately Ethereum is trying to create a platform that can achieve mainstream adoption while also providing enough security interest that guarantees to its users.
The goal is to scale the number of users to millions and potentially tens of millions, notes Buterin, who sees a couple hundred thousand users per day as a ‘very small number’.
Ethereum is also likely to see better protocol economics overall, as Buterin states,
“The more you use Ethereum, the more you realize that gas estimation is such a stupid and archaic concept.”
According to him, the introduction of EIP-1559 that solves the underlying issue of ‘high gas fees’ on the network is something to look forward to and could be one of the big stories of 2021.