It has been two weeks since the much-anticipated Ethereum 2.0 upgrade went live. Interestingly, the future is looking bright for the network as the team working on Phase 0 of the upgrade said that the launch was smooth. ConsenSys developer, Ben Edgington, in his latest ETH 2.0 update said:
It’s been a wonderfully dull eleven days since genesis: apparently it all just works. The genesis event went as smoothly as a Sade album.
Edgington notes that deposits into the Beacon Chain contract have continued to grow. As of press time, the contract had more than 1.46 million ETH (worth around $893 million).
ETH 2.0 marks the transition of the Ethereum network from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus. With Beacon Chain officially running, stakers will earn an estimated ROI of 12.9% annually. Moreover, major exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken, have started providing ETH staking services for users who do not want to run their own hardware or have enough Ethereum as collateral.
Beyond the smooth launch, there were some incidents of validators slashing. Slashing is a mechanism designed to protect the network by penalizing validators who fail to fulfill their tasks correctly. The mechanism makes it hard to attack the network and also prevents validators from acting maliciously. Edgington said:
The immediate penalty is currently only 0.25 ETH out of your 32, plus a little more due to other penalties. The main pain point is that your Ether is now locked and inactive in the beacon chain until some kind of withdrawal mechanism is in place.