Today is the Ethereum Beacon Chain’s first birthday and what an amazing first year it has been! I still remember being on a livestream and watching the Beacon Chain go live in real time back on December 1st, 2020 and then hopping on Twitter to see all the positive energy being spread once it was live. It truly was one of the most amazing milestones in Ethereum’s history - the culmination of 6 years worth of rigorous research and development - so let’s take a brief look at what happened over the last year in the world of the Beacon Chain and the wider “eth2” effort.

terence.eth 🦇🔊 @terencechain

Happy one year to beacon chain launch! 🎉 82k epochs 263k validators 8.4M staked eths $40B staked Much more to come! 🚀

December 1st 2021

13 Retweets62 Likes

As you can see above, Terence from PryLabs laid out some metrics that we can analyze to see just how successful the Beacon Chain has been thus far. Firstly, it’s incredible to see that 8.4 million ETH has now been staked which is currently worth a whopping $40 billion! That’s over 263,000 validators all staking 32 ETH each to secure the Beacon Chain and all of those validators and ETH will soon be securing the “eth1” network we all know and love after ‘The Merge’ takes place. I also expect the amount of ETH staked to continue its gradual increase until post-merge where I expect it to go parabolic due to increased APY (thanks to unburnt fee revenue + MEV going to stakers instead of miners).

Since the Beacon Chain went live, there has been plenty of tooling and infrastructure built to support it. Obol Network is building a “multi-operator validator network” using SSV, ChainSafe built an eth2 node watch website, Lido & other service providers (such as CEXs) have been offering liquid staking tokens, Rocket Pool - Ethereum’s premiere decentralized staking service - finally went live on mainnet and so much more. All of this infrastructure is very additive to the Ethereum staking ecosystem and will help it to both grow and thrive long into the future - I can’t wait to see what else people come up with.

On the client diversity front we now have 5 independent clients that power the Beacon Chain - Prysm, Lighthouse, Teku, Nimbus and Lodestar - all built and maintained by world-class teams. This is a strong signal that Ethereum values client diversity more than ever and the ecosystem is very aligned with keeping the Ethereum network as robust as possible by embracing the multi-client architecture that has been pioneered since Ethereum went live in 2015. Will we get a 6th client some day? Maybe - but that might be overkill!

The Beacon Chain had its first network upgrade, Altair, on the 27th of October and it brought with it a host of upgrades (most importantly laying the foundations for light client support). This network upgrade went off without a hitch and it was another monumental occasion for all the client teams as they had been hard at work on this upgrade for many months. There are more network upgrades planned, but they won’t be going live on the network until after eth1 and eth2 become 1 network - which segues perfectly into what I wanted to talk about next - The Merge!

Work on ‘The Merge’ has been making amazing progress since the in-person event from a couple of months ago that brought together most of the eth2 researchers and developers. The current effort, codenamed Kintsugi, is underway and there is a goal to have a long-lived devnet/testnet live in mid-December for testing/monitoring through the holiday period. If all goes well, we should expect to see some final test-nets to be spun up around February/March and then by my own very ballpark estimates - a possible merge in June of 2022 - don’t hold me to this date though!

As you can see there are so many exciting things happening in the eth2 space and it can be quite difficult to keep up with it all. Statelessness, sharding, MEV-resistance, light clients and so much more - even I find it impossible to be across everything at all times. Though, as usual, I highly recommend subscribing to Ben Edgington’s ‘What’s new in Eth2’ newsletter here - it is the single best resource for keeping up with eth2 (while keeping your sanity).

Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano

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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.