The latest update from the team working on Phase 0 of the ETH 2.0 upgrade has praised the smooth launch of the new blockchain which was only marred by a number of validators getting ‘slashed.’
It has now been two weeks since Beacon Chain went live heralding in a new era for Ethereum as the Serenity upgrade gets underway. The launch has been a rather eventless affair, which is good news as confirmed by ConsenSys developer Ben Edgington in his latest ETH 2.0 update.
“It’s been a wonderfully dull eleven days since genesis: apparently it all just works. The genesis event went as smoothly as a Sade album.”
Ethereum Staking Growing Stronger
Edgington continued, noting that deposits into the Beacon Chain contract continue to pile in as confidence grows. At the time of press, there had been 1.46 million ETH worth around $863 million at current prices deposited according to the Launchpad dashboard. This represents almost 1.3% of the entire supply.
Now that Beacon Chain is officially running, and earning an estimated 12.9% annual percentage yield for stakers, major exchanges such as Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken, are providing the service for those that do not want to run their own hardware.
Those that wanted early access needed to set up their own hardware and software to become validators, but as a few of them have found out, the penalties for ‘misbehavior’ can be harsh. Edgington identified five distinct slashing incidents which he labeled as the ‘biggest dramas’ so far.
Slashing is a defense mechanism that has been designed to protect the network by punishing validators if they do not fulfill their tasks correctly.
It essentially serves two purposes, firstly to make it expensive to attack the network, and secondly to prevent validators from underperforming or acting maliciously. The developer stated that getting slashed is not as bad as it seems, elaborating;
“The immediate penalty is currently only 0.25 ETH out of your 32, plus a little more due to other penalties. The main pain point is that your Ether is now locked and inactive in the beacon chain until some kind of withdrawal mechanism is in place.”
He added that three of the incidents were the result of bad practices that have been repeatedly advised against — namely, running the same validator keys on more than one validator instance.
Price Outlook
Ethereum prices are starting to recover again as the market correction may have found its local bottom. A low of just under $540 was hit on Dec. 11 and over the weekend ETH prices climbed to top $590 by Monday morning’s trading session in the Asia region.
Ethereum advocate Anthony Sassano said he was still buying, even at these high prices;
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