The Bitfinex exchange announced today that it now supports ETH 2.0 trading, thus giving its users the ability to enter and exit Ethereum staking.
As we know, in fact, with Ethereum 2.0 you can stake your ETH to receive rewards based on the number of cryptocurrencies you lock.
Currently, there are over 3 billion dollars on the ETH 2.0 deposit contract.
On Bitfinex you will be able to trade with different pairs:
- US dollar (ETH2/USD),
- Ethereum (ETH2/ETH),
- and of course the stablecoin Tether (ETH2/USDt).
This new feature announced by Bitfinex will be available from tomorrow, 21 January 2021, at 2:00 PM UTC.
Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Bitfinex, explained:
“We’re pleased to launch trading of ETH 2.0 in our peer-to-peer markets. This will provide our growing customer base with another avenue to participate in a monumental event in crypto, ETH 2.0 staking.”
Ethereum 2.0 on Bitfinex
In any case, Bitfinex already announced last December that it also supports ETH 2.0 staking, with no minimum amount to be locked.
Phase zero of the launch of Ethereum 2.0 had in fact taken place in early December, when the first block of the Beacon Chain was generated, proposed by the validator 19026.
In total, at the start of this process, there were over 21,000 active validators, with over 674,000 ETH in staking.
This Beacon Chain is the first phase that will then allow the development of new technologies and features that will take off the speed of the Ethereum network, thanks to the introduction of Proof of Stake (PoS).
Before, in fact, Ethereum was a blockchain based on Proof of Work like Bitcoin, but in order to have a more scalable structure and therefore faster and less expensive fees, Vitalik Buterin and his developers wanted to change the form of consensus, also because with the spread of DeFi, Ethereum needs to satisfy an increasing number of users.
