$3 Billion ETH Now Staked as bETH Starts Trading

Ethereum 2.0 deposits have surpassed $3 billion eth for the first time ever, accounting for about 2% of ethereum’s total supply.

Nearly 2.5 million eth has now been deposited to ethereum 2.0, the new Proof of Stake blockchain that plans to fully replace miners with ethereum validating holders.

Some 60,000 validators are now securing the ethereum 2.0 network with more than 15,000 awaiting to join.

Making this the biggest Proof of Stake network which has been running for two months without any problems.

Kraken is rising as one of the main platform for staking with the exchange taking care of all aspects for 15% of the staking profits.

You can further exchange the staked eth, dubbed bETH or ETH2.S on Kraken, for actual eth.

On OKex for example bETH sells for 0.93 eth. On Kraken it’s more like ◊0.97.

Kraken says you can’t transfer this ETH2.S through the ethereum network, making this effectively a futures contract with the eth delivery perhaps sometime next year.

As the staked eth is locked for probably two years, you can’t arbitrage neither between beth and eth nor between Kraken’s and OKex’s beths.

Thus we’re getting different markets depending on just how much demand there is to stake or unstake on the platform, but you could potentially speculatively ‘arbitrage’ as in some ways you’re buying ‘dividend’ giving eth at a discount of if you plan to stake instead of plain eth you can buy discount beth.

Coinbase has not yet began ethereum staking. They promised last year they would roll it out sometime this month, but the exchange is now very busy with scaling their trading engine.

There’s plenty of choice for prospective stakers however. You can always solo stake by running your own eth and eth 2 nodes with guidance from the launchpad, or you can one click stake through Kraken, Bitcoin Suisse, Huobi, OKEx and Binance.

The yearly interest rate in eth is now 10% with this expected to fall because until eth1 is merged into eth2, the total staking supply can only increase or remain unchanged. It can’t decrease because you can’t unstake until the merger, but you can futures contracts exchange.

These stakers therefore are being forced to hold, after willingly making the decision to stake, so removing the temptation to sell on dips.

That should affect ethereum’s price to some extent, with it again seemingly heading towards perhaps trying to take that all time high after support held following three tests of $898 or so.