According to the official announcement on the Beacon Chain, the much-awaited upgrade to the Ethereum (ETH) Network is live now. The ETH community has shown great support for the upgrade with nearly 900,000 staked ETH, around 370,000 more than the original requirement of 524,288.

Ethereum plans to include a proof-of-stake network with the recent upgrade to address scalability problems in the network. Canadian-Russian Programmer and Co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin expressed his happiness over the launch and thanked the Ethereum community for constant support.

Ethereum 2.0 has been under construction since the genesis of the current proof-of-work (PoW) network in 2015. The newly launched Beacon chain holds significant importance for the overall structure of the Ethereum blockchain. Today’s launch of ‘Phase 0’ is just the first step towards a major shift to proof-of-stake (PoS).

Commenting on the launch of Ethereum 2.0 during a live stream, Danny Ryan, core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, said: “Key to the health of this thing is we see participation over two thirds, I’m like hyped, it’s four in the morning and I’m hyped. We got all the metrics up and I’m very excited. I’m very confident in the launch but if something goes wrong I’m very confident in the engineer’s ability to fix it. We thought we were going to launch in December last year. It’s been a journey.”

Beacon Chain

The newly launched chain is the first step towards a complete shift of the Ethereum network. The Beacon chain will play a major role in the new blockchain to rival giants, like Visa and PayPal. There are two important technical barriers to Ethereum 2.0. First is effectively breaking the PoS Ethereum blockchain into multiple datasets called ‘shards’ and secondly, adopting Rollups, a comprehensive solution for dapps.

The Ethereum community supported the project and showed great confidence, Finance Magnates earlier reported about the decision of Dubai’s IBC Group to stake around 22,000 Ethereum in support of Ethereum 2.0.