The Potential Ripple Effects of Ethereum 2.0, Explained

Oct 10, 2020 at 19:00 UTC.The virtual event invest: ethereum economy takes place on Wednesday, Oct. 14.

CoinDesk's Christine Kim spoke to colleagues Michael J. Casey and Aaron Stanley about the most compelling and under-discussed topics about Ethereum 2.0 headlining next week's conference.

From the dynamics of staking to the architecture of sharding, there haven't been many topics Ethereum 2.0 core developers have shied away from discussing over the past five weeks on "Developer Perspectives: Ethereum 2.0.".

Each discussion has sparked new questions about the ramifications of Ethereum's transition to proof-of-stake on the crypto markets and the broader blockchain industry.

"Do we end up with a split, [with] two versions of ethereum or at least two tokens that trade differently in the marketplace?".

Casey added that financial engineers in the decentralized finance space will likely seek to unlock the liquidity of staked ETH on Ethereum 2.0 before token transfers are officially enabled on the network.

Along with lingering questions over how the markets will react to the launch of Ethereum 2.0, there's also uncertainty over how the launch will affect the competitive landscape for dapp users and dapp developers in the crypto industry.

With the recent popularity around yield farming and liquidity mining on Ethereum, Stanley also questioned what the real incentives are for users holding large amounts of ETH, upwards of $11,000 worth, to stake on Ethereum 2.0 when they could earn "100x returns farming 'hotdog coin' or whatever the meme coin of the day is."

These questions are pertinent to the discussions happening next Wednesday at invest: ethereum economy.

CoinDesk Research has recently published an updated report about the launch of Ethereum 2.0, as well as recent developments on the existing Ethereum blockchain.