$30B Ethereum Is Locked In The ETH 2.0 Deposit Contract

The amount of Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) staked in the ETH 2.0 deposit contract has reached 9 million ETH worth $30 billion at current prices.

What Happened: There is currently 9,003,763 ETH locked in the contract, according to data from Etherscan. This means that none of the billions of dollars worth of ETH in the contract can be spent or withdrawn until the Beacon Chain merges with the Ethereum mainnet.

For context, the ETH 2.0 deposit contract – or the Beacon Chain – represents a parallel Proof-of-Stake chain that will eventually merge with the original Ethereum blockchain. Essentially, the Beacon Chain represents the first step in Ethereum’s transition to be a fully Proof-of-Stake blockchain.

Ethereum 2.0 Upgrade Looks To Be Coming In 2022: Here's What Changed And How To Prepare

In order to be a validator on the new Proof-of-Stake Ethereum blockchain, users will have to stake 32 ETH. Validators are to a Proof-of-Stake blockchain what miners are to a Proof-of-Work blockchain. They're important stakeholders to the network and earn rewards for keeping the blockchain up and running by validating transactions and creating new blocks.

At the time of writing, there were 281,370 active validators who had locked their ETH into the deposit contract. With no clarity on the exact date as to when the ETH 2.0 merge will take place, the $30 billion staked ETH represents an enormous amount of confidence on behalf of the validators.

Price Action: As of Friday morning, ETH was trading at $3,258, down 2.74% in the last 24 hours.