In a major development for the world’s largest smart contracts platform, the European Investment Bank has sold 2Y $121M of digital bonds, issued over the public Ethereum network through Goldman Sachs International, Santander, and Societe Generale on Apr 28. This news gives grants major credibility to the Ethereum blockchain as the global settlement layer and the price has responded favorably to it, crossing over $2700 and establishing a new all-time high.
Ethereum has benefited immensely from the influx of good news. Lately, DeFi and NFT have been the dominant narrative pushing the blockchain lately. Now traditional finance or TradeFi has joined the race. Major corporations are recognizing the blockchain as a dominant player in the field. Now with EIP1559 expected to be deployed this summer and Eth2 in full swing, ETH price is bound to do a lot better in the future.
About Ethereum 2.0
Ethereum 2.0 is the next big upgrade for the Ethereum network. It will bring Proof of Stake (POS), eWASM, and sharding. It will reduce the resources, required to run the Ethereum network, as well as bring scalability and performance improvements.
The Eth2 upgrade will start in three phases. The first Phase 0 Beacon Chain, expected by the end of Q2 2020, will introduce the staking facility. This comes after Phase 1 in Q1 2021. The latter will introduce sharding and allows data storage on shards, however, transactions can’t still be processed.
Phase 2 will make Ethereum 2.0 truly complete and the network operational, after its introduction at some point in 2022. It will bring the Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM) replacing the now operational Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Only after the Phase 2 rollout, proper execution of smart contracts and transactions can commence on the new Eth2 chain. The Eth1 and Eth2 chain will gradually merge with each other.