Key facts:
More than 9.4 million ETH is deposited in the contract to validate the Beacon Chain.
In December 2021, the blocked ethers were 8 million, 7.3% of the total.
The smart contract in which the ethers (ETH) of the validators of the new Ethereum 2.0 network are deposited already has more than 8% of the total stock of the cryptocurrency.
Specifically, the tool ether scan shows that in the contract called “Eth2 Deposit Contract” there are 9,476,066 ETH, an amount that is equivalent to almost a tenth of the total existence of the cryptocurrency. It is also the contract with the highest value deposited in this network.
To give the figure greater dimension, it can be considered that it is equivalent to USD 29,246,456, according to the CriptoNoticias price index at the time of writing this note.
Ethereum 2.0 will be based on proof of stake (PoS) for transaction confirmation and the addition of new blocks to the chain. In other words, it will soon abandon mining or proof of work (PoW). For it, validators are needed with deposits of 32 ETH each that can fulfill this role.
This medium reported in December that the number of validators had increased significantly during 2021. Thus, the new blockchain —which is still in an early testing phase— by then it already had more than 270,000 validatorsa 1,100% increase over the figure with which it had started that year.
All these data only confirm the growth that the new version of Ethereum, commonly called Ethereum 2.0, is having, although its developers have proposed the name “consensus layer”. As CriptoNoticias reported on February 15, its Beacon Chain backbone, one of the 64 fragments that the new blockchain will have, has grown exponentially in the last year.
Criticism of an alleged “centralization” of Ethereum
One of the main criticisms that are usually made of Ethereum, both in its current version and in the future “consensus layer”, is that it is a centralized network. This was recently stated by the analysts of the American bank Morgan Stanley, who compared this chain of blocks with that of Bitcoin, according to reported Valora Analitik.
However, this statement can be disproved just by looking at the etherscan data. If one reviews the contracts with the most ETH deposited, one can notice that these correspond to exchanges or decentralized finance protocols (DeFi) and not to private institutions. Compound, Binance, Kraken and Gemini are just some of those that appear in the top places.
Moreover, if we go down to number 59 on the list, we will see a group of 47 contracts with the same amount of ETH (150,000), almost as if they were identical copies of a smart contract that divided an amount of cryptocurrency into parts. same.
Therefore, it does not seem the most accurate to speak of a centralized network when the stock of crypto assets is so divided and does not belong to private companies or individuals. At least in the 15 contracts with the most blocked ethers, there are only 3 with unidentified addresses, which corresponds to “barely” 3.4% of the total supply of the network.