Quarterly Outlook
Fixed Income Outlook: Bonds Hit Reset. A New Equilibrium Emerges
Althea Spinozzi
Head of Fixed Income Strategy
Senior Quantitative Analyst, Saxo Bank
Summary: The optionality to stake ETH to earn rewards in the Ethereum 2.0 framework is now becoming easier to access as digital currency exchanges expand their offerings, allowing more users to participate in validating transactions.
With the ETH 2.0 upgrade launched in the end of last year, the Ethereum network is in an ongoing process of moving away from validating transactions through mining to a proof-of-stake framework. Holders of ETH can stake a part of their ETH in order to receive rewards for verifying transactions – or lose a part of their stake if failing to verify.
In the new framework, a validator will as a standard need to stake 32 ETH to run a validator node on Ethereum’s new blockchain, or the person will have to locate some of the staking pools on the internet, allowing participation with less ETH. As a new initiative, the crypto exchange Coinbase has launched a waitlist where holders of ETH will be able to stake any amount of ETH from their account. This increases the accessibility for smaller players for joining the validation, as well as getting a part of the validation rewards. It will broaden the span of people who are staking and thus can increase the security on the network, although it in this case still will go through Coinbase as the bigger player. The trend of offering the possibility of ETH staking to a wider audience may likely be seen on more digital currency exchanges in the near future.
The evolution of the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade may be followed here, where the two charts below are also taken from.