There's Now 2 Million ETH Locked Up in Ethereum 2.0

There is now 2 million Ethereum locked up in the first stage of Ethereum’s network upgrade, Ethereum 2.0.

As of this writing, just over 2 million ETH is locked up in the Ethereum 2.0 staking contract. At Ethereum’s current price, $612, this is worth $1.2 billion worth of Ethereum. 

This also means that the threshold of staked ETH necessary to kick Ethereum 2.0 into action has been surpassed by a touch over 380%, according to Dune Analytics. It took about 45,000 transactions to get to this point. 

The Ethereum 2.0 network upgrade promises to make the Ethereum network, quicker and cheaper to use. Currently, Ethereum suffers from huge bottlenecks, pumping the price of Ethereum's fees; on September 2, the network was so clogged up that a single Ethereum transaction cost an average of $14.5.

People send ETH to the ETH2.0 staking contract because Ethereum will pay out money to stakers for processing transactions when the network launches. Staking replaces Ethereum's old proof-of-work model, where miners expended computational processing power to confirm transactions.

ETH2.0 launched earlier this month, although it's just the first step in a multi-year process.