Coinbase has added a mirrored version of Ether to its crypto price index, just before an important network upgrade that is scheduled to take place on December 10th.
Named “ETH2,” the symbol looks like it is tracking the original Ether market data synchronously. For example, the fee asked to buy ETH2 is the same one as the one for ETH. Furthermore, their market caps, volumes, circulating supplies, and price changes were also the same.
But in contrast to the original, the ETH2 token didn’t present any Trading Activity, Popularity Score, or Typical Hold Time, which would indicate that, at least for now, it is simply tracking the ETH market data – until mid-2022, probably, when the new upgrade of Ethereum, Ethereum 2.0, is scheduled to go live.
Coinbase’s index listing seems to be closer to “Arrow Glacier,” a fork that could offer developers additional time in getting ready for Ethereum 2.0.
The Arrow Glaciar update wants to delay a difficulty bomb that would make mining Ethereum more difficult. If the bomb were to be triggered, the Ethereum network would be slowed down, as long as it continues to use the PoW consensus mechanism.
One of the core developers on the Ethereum upgrade, Tim Beiko, said that Arrow Glacier could be the last upgrade on the network before Ethereum 2.0. The major aspect of the upgrade to Ethereum 2.0 is that the network would make the transition from PoW to PoS.
Beacon Chain, which was released in December 2020, would get the validator role for shards, thus helping Ethereum 2.0 in reaching consensus. It would also have the role of discovering bad actors and validators and applying penalties.
The core of the Ethereum 2.0 PoS is ETH2 which would be a staking token for validators to take part in the network consensus and get block rewards.
The deposit contract of Beacon Chain received more than 8.42 million ETH tokens from 55,330 unique validators since it was released.
