In Brief:
- The single largest Ethereum contract containing 8,641,954 Ether (ETH) worth $33.5 billion is trapped because it cannot be spent or traded.
- The contract cannot be spent without a hardfork.
The single largest Ethereum contract containing 8,641,954 Ether (ETH) worth $33.5 billion is reportedly ‘locked and trapped’ because it cannot be spent or traded.
A tweet by @TomerStrolight brought to notice the Beacon chain contract describing it to be the largest Ethereum contract with billions of dollars worth of ETH “sitting idle” inside it and hence trapped.
The aforementioned contract is an Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain staking contract and cannot be spent or traded without a hardfork.
A hard fork is a radical change to a network’s protocol that converts previously invalid blocks and transactions into a valid one, or vice-versa. For a hard fork to work, all nodes or users have to be upgraded to the latest version of the protocol software.
Interestingly, people are sending their ETH into the contract even after being aware of the fact that the terms of the hard fork are undecided. The terms of the hard fork can be decided once the Beacon chain is merged with the Ethereum mainnet.
The Beacon chain is the first significant step in Ethereum’s transition from a proof-of-work mining consensus to a proof-of-stake (PoS) one.
A trader must stake a minimum of 32 ETH if one wants to make a validator in Eth 2.0. Hence, the $33.5 billion worth of ETH in the largest Beacon chain contract indicates the high trust factor of the upcoming Eth 2.0.
Recently, Marius van der Wijden, an ETH2 developer, announced a program to engage the community in testing the Merge between the Ethereum Mainnet and the PoS-based Beacon Chain. The Merge which is a significant step in the transition to Eth2 is expected to be completed by 2022.
