What was once seen as a distant dream has turned into reality, with 10 million ETH tokens now being staked on the Ethereum beacon chain. This is a huge milestone for Ethereum staking.
The total value of the staked tokens is around $25 Billion Dollars, placing Ethereum’s $ETH as the 3rd ranking asset in terms of staked value, just behind Terra ($LUNA) and Solana ($SOL).
This number only represents ETH staked on the Beacon Chain, and does not take into account ETH that is locked in DeFi, an amount that would exceed $140 Billion Dollars and easily place Ethereum at the #1 spot by a large margin, if it were to be taken into account for this type of calculation.
Ethereum Staking Is Lagging Behind Terra & Solana?
One of the reasons that Terra and Solana are ahead of Ethereum in terms of staked value has of course to do with Ethereum’s initial entry barriers of the 32 ETH required to be an independent staker.
In addition to that, the fact that until the Ethereum Merge, which will see the protocol fully transition from Proof-Of-Work to Proof-Of-Stake happens, deposits are a one-way street. You can deposit your ETH, but you cannot withdraw it until the merge happens, and validator withdrawals are enabled.
Both of these concerns have of course been addressed pretty quickly by companies like Lido and Rocket Pool, who offer liquid crypto staking, which allows you to get ETH-pegged tokens when you stake through their protocol, in addition to allowing anyone with as little as 0.01 ETH to become a staker.
At the same time, these 2 significant factors, coupled with the Ethereum merge scheduled for a future time (likely during Q3/Q4 of 2022), are what appears to be suppressing an all-out deposit frenzy into ETH Staking.
Ethereum Launches Last Public Testnet “Kiln” Ahead Of The Merge
Another step in the right direction took place just this week, when the Ethereum Foundation announced the configs for the “Kiln” testnet are now available.
superphiz, once of the leaders of the ETHStaker community said that Kiln is the biggest milestone for the Ethereum merge, with Tim Beiko, a lead Ethereum Foundation developer, agreeing with him
To add to this: the amount of data we gather on Kiln can directly influence how soon we are ready for The Merge… 👀!
— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth 🔥🧱 (@TimBeiko) March 9, 2022
This is the time for application, tooling, infrastructure providers & developers to test things 🛠 If there are bugs, now’s when we want to find them 🐛. https://t.co/rLPdNGYMgJ
What was once looked at by the community as sort of a meme due to numerous delays is now slowly but surely taking shape and is expected to become a reality sooner rather than later. We will soon see Ethereum complete the equivalent of replacing a Boeing 747 engine mid-flight by upgrading a live, fully functioning blockchain’s protocol.
