Just over a week remains till the end of August, and with it comes the most eagerly anticipated event in the Ethereum sector in the previous twelve months: the ETH Merge, also known as Ethereum 2.0. OKLink data reveals 13,343,768 ETH was sent to the contract address on Ethereum 2.0.
Developers had previously announced September 15 as the day when the Ethereum network would switch over to the PoS mechanism. After further investigation, OKLink discovered that the stake rate was higher than 11.17 percent. An additional $53,000 USD in ETH has been pledged thus far this month, with another $36,000 USD added to the deposit contract address every week.
The Current State of Ethereum 2.0 as of August
If the blockchain were to switch to PoS, validators would check transactions before adding them to the chain. To become a validator on the network, users must make a 32 ETH investment. This payment launches the validator program.
In early August, Glassnode data showed a surge in transactions sending 32 $ETH to the Ethereum 2.0 contract address. The network had processed a total of 5,083 deposits as of August 21st, including 114 new transactions.
As of the time this was written, the total number of deposits to the Ethereum 2.0 contract had hovered around 424,758. It was an increase of 1.4% from the beginning of August. There are 4,527,444 validators for ETH 2.0. There have been 5,084 new validators added to the network in the previous 21 days (as the Merge approaches).
Analyzing staking over a longer period of time revealed a gradual decrease in the weekly amount of $ETH submitted for mounting beginning in March. That’s still a cause for worry.
Boys’ Group Head
Many staking providers actually make it easy to send ETH to the Ethereum 2.0 contract address. With 4,149,796 $ETH staked, Lido Finance is still the leading staking provider. That amounts to 31.10 percent of all the ETH at stake right now on the market.
Even then, August has shown broad market fall, and Lido Finance’s TVL (total value locked) has dropped by 4% since the market opened (DeFiLlama data). The value of LDO, the native coin of the protocol, has fallen precipitously since early August.
At the time of writing, LDO had a market value of $1.89, down by over 23% in the preceding 21 days. While trade volume increased by 235.75% over the past day, the token only increased by 0.1%.
