On September 26, the new Ethereum testnet Spadina Launchpad was activated, running in parallel with the Medalla mainnet, conducting a three-day multi-client public test, and upgrading the Lighthouse node on the testnet Medalla to v0.2.8, and everything is currently running normal.
Today, Raul Jordan, an Ethereum developer and co-founder of Prysmatic Labs, stated that the team will complete the development of all functions of the Ethereum 2.0 version 0 stage by October 15. The final features currently being developed by Prysmatic Labs and the software development team include ensuring that the Ethereum 2.0 client is interoperable and can be used interchangeably by users without the risk of losing validator tokens. According to the current development progress and testing situation, Ethereum 2.0 version 0 phase is expected to be launched in November.
Ethereum 1.0 opened the era of smart contracts. Its open ecology has made more digital currency applications possible. However, in recent years, as the transaction volume and the entire ecological application have soared, its drawbacks have gradually emerged. Obviously, the skyrocketing gas cost and the serious congestion on the chain, these two points became particularly prominent after DeFi became popular this year, which has greatly hindered the development of Ethereum.
According to OKLink, the fee income of Ethereum miners is 4 times the block reward. At present, the average income of each block of Ethereum is about 10 ETH, of which the system block reward is 2 ETH, and the remaining 8 ETH is the fee income. Since June this year, Ethereum's miner fees have risen by 60%, which is more than twice the income of Bitcoin miners, setting a record high in Ethereum's miner fees.
In addition to transaction fees, DeFi opens the liquidity mining model, and it is imminent to trigger the upgrade of Ethereum. If Ethereum wants to open nodes to pledge ETH to provide liquidity, it has to upgrade the smart contract system to solve the congestion on the chain and the interaction between users and multiple clients. Operational problems.
Ethereum 2.0 version uses a shard chain instead of a single chain. Compared with a single chain, a shard chain places data processing between many nodes, which is more helpful for verifying information and improving transaction speed. According to the test report published by Ethereum, a single Ethereum chain should be divided into 64 different shards. By then, the throughput of Ethereum will increase by 64 times, which will help reduce gas costs and congestion on the chain. Recently, the new test network Spadina Launchpad and the Medalla main network are running in parallel. The multi-client test results are all normal, and the interoperability problem of users' multi-clients has also been solved.
Therefore, after the launch of Ethereum 2.0, cheap gas fees and smooth on-chain transactions will boost the price of Ethereum and the rapid development of DeFi. However, judging from the entire DeFi market at present, due to the high operational thresholds in the primary market, it is difficult for most users to simultaneously grasp the wallet registration, wallet key management, interaction between wallet and protocol, as well as lending and trading in a short time. , Mining, synthetic assets and other more complex interactions.
From the perspective of the secondary market, the recent DeFi series of tokens have not performed very well. LINK, SUSHI, CRV, PEARL, etc. have fallen by more than 50%. The newly launched tokens have also fallen sharply except for a few. Coupled with black swan incidents such as the theft of DEX wallets, the entire DeFi secondary market now appears to be relatively sluggish. Compared with mid-to-late August and early September, the popularity has dropped a lot, and most users are on the sidelines.
But what is surprising is that the DeFi currency trading market has receded, while the options market has become popular. According to the data analysis of the world's largest bitcoin options trading platform BitOffer, since the launch of DeFi options in early September, the trading volume has reached a new high every day. The current daily trading volume has exceeded 100 million US dollars, and the average daily active users are 100,000+. It is increasing at a rate of about 1% per day.
The reason why DeFi options are sought after by so many users, Lucian, the chief analyst of BitOffer Exchange, believes that this is related to the characteristics of options that are small and big and can be used as contract and spot hedging tools. The DeFi series of tokens have relatively large fluctuations. Whether options are single-buy or as a hedge, there is great room for profit. In addition, BitOffer's first global DeFi American option has 0 margin, 0 handling fee, no liquidation mechanism, and can be used at any time. The characteristics of closing positions have attracted a large number of players to participate. Judging from the current daily trading volume of DeFi options and the data of new users, DeFi options will become the market vane.