The number of Ethereum wallets containing the minimum amount of Ether required for ETH 2.0 staking has grown to 120,000 in anticipation of Ethereum’s upcoming network upgrade.
According to a report by research firm Arcane Research, which used data from on-chain analytics startup Nansen, the number of Ethereum wallets containing at least 32 ETH, the minimum required for staking, has grown by 13% over the past year.
Arcane Research teased that data shows Ether investors are accumulating ETH ahead of the ETH 2.0 launch, which will shift Ethereum from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS):
👀Another sneak peek into our weekly market report👀
Are investors getting ready for Ethereum staking? Data from @nansen_ai shows that almost 120,000 @ethereum wallets are ready for staking. This number has grown by 13% over the past year.
Read more here: https://t.co/UKFQKI2jze pic.twitter.com/G3nXhylels— Arcane Research (@ArcaneResearch) June 8, 2020
Investors with at least 32 ether in their wallet will be eligible to participate in staking following the ETH 2.0 update. Staking allows users to contribute their stored cryptoassets towards improving the network’s overall function while receiving a small dividend in return.
Nansen co-founder and data scientist Alex Svanevik told Decrypt the majority of Ethereum addresses qualifying for the “32 ETH Club” belonged to individuals rather than cryptocurrency exchanges, with the latter accounting for less than 1,000 wallets.
However, exchanges still held a large proportion of the total Ether amongst the wealthiest wallets.
Nansen said:
“Specifically, out of the 105M ETH held by the ‘32 ETH Club’ addresses, at least 32M ETH are held by exchange wallets—in other words, [greater than] 30%.”
Despite multiple delays, Phase 0 of ETH 2.0 is expected to launch in 2020, with some pointing to Ethereum’s 5th anniversary on July 30th as a potential date to watch.
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