Ethereum 2.0 Deposit Contract to Go Live Shortly 

Ben Edgington, a member of the Ethereum 2.0 development team, has released a report concerning the progress made so far in the ETH 2.0 development and has hinted that the deposit contract will go live in the coming days, with ETH 2.0 staking to commence before the end of 2020.

ETH 2.0 Gets Ever Closer 

Having overcome the setbacks brought upon the ETH2.0 project by the failed Spadina testnet with the successful launch of the Zinken testnet, Ethereum 2.0 is on the verge of reaching another significant milestone in its journey, if recent reports are anything to go by.

According to an October 18 report released by Ben Edgington of ConsenSys, version 1.0.0 release candidate 0 of the ETH2.0 beacon chain has been published and it comes with several significant changes as compared to the current v0.12.x running on Medalla. 

For those who are unaware, the beacon chain is a key distributed ledger at the heart of ETH2.0 and its major duty is to ensure that the entire network is in sync with accurate data at all times, since ETH2 uses multiple shards to store data, in a bid to boost scalability and throughput. 

Notably, Edgington has hinted that the latest version of beacon chain has been made more resistant to DoS attacks, Genesis Delay time has been increased to one week, and the inactivity penalty quotient has been quadrupled.

Edgington wrote:

“This quarters the penalties during non-finalisation and is a temporary measure to give stakers more confidence in case we hit trouble. MIN Slashing Penalty Quotient has been quadrupled, which means that the base penalty for being slashed is only 0.25 ether. Again, this is temporary.”

The ETH2.0 Deposit Contract 

Edgington says the stage is now set for ETH2.0 deposit contract to go live any moment from now, while the beacon chain genesis will be launched between six to eight weeks after the successful roll-out of the former.

However, Ethereum enthusiasts and members of the crypto space have been warned to refrain from depositing their ether (ETH) into any deposit contract until an official announcement is made by the Ethereum team, in order not to fall victim to fraudsters.

At press time, the price of ether (ETH) sits at $375.98, with a market capitalization of $43 billion, as seen on CoinMarketCap.