Will the Ethereum Foundation Deposit to Ethereum 2.0

Will the Ethereum Foundation Deposit to Ethereum 2.0

Ethereum 2.0 is just about half way towards meeting its minimum requirement of 524,000 eth with 250,000 eth deposited at the time of writing.

There’s just about two days to go now to meet that requirement for a genesis block launch on December first.

Something that may well be achieved, but although ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin has deposited some 6,400 eth so far, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) itself has not deposited any eth.

They currently hold 560,000 eth, worth a cool $300 million, with EF spending about 40,000 eth this year so far, or realistically about $10 million.

They have other accounts however, including dollar funds, with these eth spendings being kind of on top.

To preserve those funds for as long as possible, the Ethereum Foundation could well stake and operate based on those staking profits.

Vitalik Buterin, ethereum’s co-founder, said in 2018 that the Ethereum Foundation did not have any income save for Devcon conference tickets.

He then suggested they would stake when the Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain came out, and thus that would be another source of income.

One problem may well be that these staked eth would be locked for at least two years, but they’ve been holding them a lot longer than that with the Ethereum Foundation having ◊740,000 in August 2017.

So they’ve spent about 180,000 eth since, covering a period of more than three years. Meaning the rest was held without any income generating mechanism.

Now they could potentially stake 200,000 eth or even ◊250,000, leaving them with ◊300,000 for the next two years which should be more than enough going by their past spending.

As one of the initial stakers, they may get a return of 25%, which could translate to ◊50,000 eth, although the rate of return is variable depending on how many stake.

That staking income could be sufficient to fund operations, depending on price of course, making the Ethereum Foundation self-sustainable.

One concern however may well be they don’t want to have more than 50% of the stake, but at this stage it wouldn’t be 50% and anyone is free to stake as much as they want. So it wouldn’t be they have control due to something no one can do anything about it, like XRP arguably which has control because it holds about 50% of the total supply.

Here the EF barely holds 0.5% of the total supply, so it can’t be open to that sort of criticism.

Why then has it not staked so far? That’s unknown and a bit surprising because EF staking was expected as Buterin himself said they would stake.

Thus it may be more they just haven’t gotten around to it because it would obviously make great sense for them to stake.

So it might be just a matter of time until their deposits start rolling, but whether they will, remains to be seen.

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