The ethereum 2.0 testnet has pretty much reached its goal of around 524,000 eth deposited to the smart contract.
It is now good to go on August the 4th 2020 at around 1 to 2 PM London time when the genesis block of the ethereum 2.0 testnet goes live this Tuesday.
So marking a key milestone after two years of much hard work by around 100 ethereum developers that will now showcase with circa 4 or 5 clients just what they have built.
It took about a week to reach the minimum requirement of about 524,000 testnet eth, with this having main-net configuration.
Meaning before the ethereum 2.0 genesis block launches this November, ‘ready or not’ according to Vitalik Buterin, some half a million eth will need to be sent to the deposit contract once it launches on the current ethereum Proof of Work (PoW) network.
If it is just the minimum that is sent, then stakers get huge rewards of about 21% a year.
People can still deposit however but all deposited eth will be stuck there on the Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain with the launchpad explaining you can’t transfer your eth until at least phase one and won’t be able to withdraw until phase two, that estimated to launch in 2022.
So stakers need some medium term commitment with their eth properly locked by code and thus that eth won’t be able to respond to market actions.
Meaning in the short term, ethereum’s supply will practically reduce depending on whether these were cold wallet eth anyway, but still this eth won’t be able to participate in the market regardless of what the market does for probably a minimum of at least two years.
So initially there might not be much deposited for staking, but even at 2.5 million eth, there’s still a yearly APR of 10%.
Just how transfers and everything else will actually work in practice will be shown now once the testnet launches next week with all able to see the whole process for the first time.
It’s an open network of course, so anyone can download their client of choice, go through the launchpad tutorial, then see for the next few weeks and for up to three months just what happpens.
The clients are real, everything is real, except the eth is fake. You’d be talking to other clients as well and you’d be running the network basically, but you’ll have the luxury of not caring if anything goes wrong as the whole point of this testnet is to see if something does go wrong.
The big boys probably will be playing too. Coinbase, maybe Binance, maybe defi guys, and they’ll be on equal terms in as far as your node is just as good as theirs, but hopefully they’ll be trying to break things because we need this very ironed out for November.
There’s an attack net where people get money to break it, but if you plan to stake, you might try and ‘break’ your own setup as well to see what slashes you might get and what might affect it.
This all can run on Raspberry Pis. There’s a cold wallet address option as well for withdrawals, but initially there’s no withdrawals anyway.
You can test everything though and if you find any bugs let the boys know because even if you’re black hat, there’s pretty much nothing initially on the Proof of Stake chain so coders can just Nakamoto upgrade 2009 style, or was it 2010. Meaning you might as well get the bounty.
For non coders or non 32 ethers, staking pools may well want to show off on testnet, so everybody can have a look when this goes out this Tuesday.
