The Ethereum community is rejoicing as the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain is celebrating its first year anniversary. This is notable for being the first step towards the upgrade to Ethereum 2.0.
Currently, Ethereum 2.0 represents the second-largest proof-of-stake network by staked capitalization as it has $38.4 billion locked up. First place goes to Solana which has $88.2 billion, but it is worth mentioning that Ether has only 7.10% of the supply locked in staking while SOL has 77.4%. As a result, many specialists predict Ethereum will soon rise to the first position.
Since the release of the Beacon Chain in 2020, Ethereum went through a series of important updates in its roadmap for Ethereum 2.0 and move from the PoS consensus mechanism.
Back in April, we experienced the Berlin hard fork which was a success, pushing prices to then-record highs of $2,200. This upgrade included four EIPs, like measures for reducing the costs that came with some transactions, increasing the expense that came with the launch of DoS attacks, and bundling several transactions into one transfer.
The London upgrade came to be in August and it launched five EIPs that had the goal of changing the fee market of Ethereum.
By far, the most important one was the 1559 one, which created a base fee for burning alongside a tip for miners every time a transaction takes place on Ethereum. About 1.088 million Ether (worth $5 billion) have been destroyed since then which had a deflationary impact on the supply of Ethereum.
The most recent upgrade is Altair which was released in October. As a result, the price of ETH reached a new ATH of more than $4,400.
This upgrade was made to the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain, unlike the previous two, which introduced the first changes on it since it was first launched. Tim Beiko, Ethereum developer, stated that the role of Altair is to make sure that the Beacon Chain “works properly” and to pave the way for the upcoming chain to merge with the existing Ethereum network.
“It shows we are able to upgrade the PoS mechanism, and that’s a precondition to the migration next year,” he said. “It means there’s a slightly higher chance that things will go well for the [Eth2] transition next year.”
The merge is long-awaited as it will leave the PoS consensus mechanism behind and all transaction validation will be moved to the beacon chain and stakers. No official date has been announced for now, but the upgrade is expected to arrive in Q2 2022.