According to reports, Ethereum miners recently made more in transaction fees than bitcoin miners over two days. While this is great for miners, the media chose to paint this stat as something that came from left field. But when looking at total transactions, you’ll see this momentum was building.
Total transactions indicate how much traffic is happening on Ethereum. And it tells a clear story of how much Ethereum is really growing.Since the beginning of the year, transactions on Ethereum have grown nearly 80%, while bitcoin has remained relatively flat. Part of this is thanks to Tether (USDT) moving a significant portion of its activity to Ethereum and the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem growing.
DeFi Pulse, a website tracking the amount of value locked up in the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem, shows that figure topped $1 billion this month. And some of this growth is attributed to BTC being locked up within Ethereum.This might seem odd at first, but several projects are making it happen. Being able to tap into one of the most liquid cryptocurrencies can open up additional use cases for them and more value for users.
Since the start of May 2020, the amount of bitcoin locked up in Ethereum DeFi has grown from 2,000 BTC to nearly 5,000 BTC. We expect this to keep growing as more projects bring BTC into the Ethereum ecosystem.
Now, DeFi is only one part of the Ethereum ecosystem. Other development areas include storage systems, enterprise use, renting computing power, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), gaming, derivatives, DEXs, and more.
All these developments are being spurred by one catalyst: ETH 2.0. It’ll be one of the largest upgrades in crypto ever. The network plans to transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof- of-Stake (PoS) consensus to improve decentralization, scalability, speed, and security. The entire process will take several years.
Phase 0 is the first part of ETH 2.0. It will be the Beacon Chain for ETH 2.0, the foundation for the rest of the network. And we expect it in the next few months. It’s currently being stress-tested and once the main validators agree the network is reliable, Phase 0 will roll out.
One of the most significant features Phase 0 will introduce is staking. Individuals can earn staking fees as validators of the Beacon Chain before any real activity migrates to ETH 2.0. This is significant, because an individual must stake 32 ETH to become a validator. This locks up supply and creates a scarcity of the remaining ETH in circulation. We expect this to reward ETH holders in turn.
Keep in mind, the growth of DeFi and the rollout of ETH 2.0 are only two bullish aspects of Ethereum. With over 2,000 applications and the largest developer base in crypto, there are dozens of areas that will bring even more transactions and usage to the network. ETH 2.0 will simply remove limits to the growth of its ecosystem.