Number of Ethereum staked on ETH 2.0 climbs to 5 million

Interest in staking on Ethereum 2.0 has continued to increase as the “beacon chain” contract sees more than 5 million ETH locked on the protocol.

According to Eth2 Launchpad, over 5 million ETH has been deposited on the Ethereum 2.0 staking contract. At current market prices, the value of the staked ETH is more than $13 million.

ETH 2.0 marks the network’s transition from a ‘proof of work (PoW)’ consensus to a ‘proof of stake (PoS).’ The highly-anticipated update has been touted as the scaling solution that the network needs to handle current high transaction costs. Furthermore, the project’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin earlier said that Ethereum will be able to process up to 100,000 transactions per second following the upgrade.

Looking at it from another angle, some experts have said that the move could lower Ethereum’s energy consumption rates by up to 99.95 percent. This is particularly important considering Bitcoin’s struggle with regulatory bottlenecks as a result of its high-energy consumption rate.

Beacon chain is the first step of Ethereum’s transition to PoS. Data from Dune Analytics, an Ethereum tracking platform, reveals that the staking contract has surged by 995.60% above the 524,000 threshold.

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