Ethereum 2.0: Starter Guide

imToken

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imToken

3 min readNov 5, 2020

Edit: If you want to learn how to stake ETH, check out this article:

How to stake ETH as an ordinary crypto user?

You are not super technical and have no multiple of 32ETH laying under you sofa, but still want to stake ETH? Then this…

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According to the announcement of the Ethereum Foundation, the deposit contract for Eth2.0 has been deployed (at depositcontract.eth).

Eth2.0 will start on December 1st, 20:00 Singapore time, however, only if the genesis is triggered on November 24th by having at least 16,384 validators deposit 32 ETH.

What is Eth2.0?

Eth2.0 is the next evolution of the Ethereum blockchain, and the entire community has been preparing the large-scale upgrade for many years. Eth2.0 will improve scalability through proof of stake (PoS) and a series of other technological upgrades. For more, please check out the ETH 2 Launch Pad.

Eth2.0 roadmap

Eth2.0 will be launched in at least four phases, each phase focusing on different aspects of Eth2.0:

Phase 0: Beacon chain, to achieve PoS consensus mechanism
Phase 1: Sharding, data layer expansion
Phase 1.5: Merges Eth1.0 into Eth2.0 as a Shard
Phase 2: Shards executing contracts and transfers.

Regarding the recent progress of the roadmap, you can read Vitalik’s ideas around how Rollups fit into the ETH2 roadmap.

How to participate in Eth2.0 stage 0 staking?

There are currently two ways to participate in staking:

Stake 32 ETH by yourself and run a validator node yourself; note that there are technical requirements, specific tutorial.
Provide your ETH to a staking node service provider; note that there are certain security risks. More about that here.

Validator income

Staking 32 ETH lets you become a validator. The validator is rewarded by proposing and proving blocks in proportion to the total amount of pledged ETH in the network.

For more information check this article about Eth2 economics.