By Solomon Odunayo
There have been concerns over the risks of staking the digital token ETH on Ethereum 2.0 at launch. In this regard, a supposed Ethereum enthusiast has outlined three major reasons why he wouldn’t stake ETH on Beacon Chain.
In a thread titled “Why I won’t be staking ETH at launch”, Chase Wright pointed out that he appreciates all that the much-anticipated upgrade promises to bring to the cryptocurrency ecosystem at large.
He stated that he has been involved in Onyx, Witti, Altona, and Medalla test networks. He has also tried Prysm and Lighthouse, indicating his activeness in Ethereum 2.0 testnets.
However, he emphasized that he will not be participating in the genesis and will not be staking ETH for some considerable reasons.
According to his point of view, the “average Medalla validator is still in the red”, and virtually everyone is in the red due to a bug in a single client, which was swiftly fixed. But his doubt lies in the possibility of fixing such a bug if it occurs on the mainnet.
Based on his assertion, the response of eth2 teams to issues has been unacceptable, “None of the teams have demonstrated their ability to “fix” a situation like this. To this date there hasn’t been a single successful fork of an ETH2 beacon chain,” Chase Wright tweeted.
He added that the Eth2 team’s response to such questions is like “Let’s get it out the door and worry about forks later.”
On the second reason why he won’t be staking ETH at launch, he stated that “you would think that prior to going to mainnet the teams would all just agree on unified APIs that would allow a validator node from one client to talk to a beacon node from another client…but no, that seems to be something to finalize/work out later too. The whole thing wreaks of being in a hurry to deliver on an arbitrary deadline that nobody is enforcing but themselves.”
According to him, there is a disconnection between the quality, funding, and cooperation among the Ethereum 2.0 client teams.
The third issue he has with all the testnets is the centralization. He opined that they don’t look like the format of the much-awaited mainnet. Buttressing his point, he said, “Goerli ETH is easy to get and people are running hundreds or thousands of validators at a time.”
Danny Ryan Weighs In
Danny Ryan, the coordinator of Ethereum 2.0, did not completely agree with Chase Wright’s opinion, but he also doesn’t expect everyone to take part in the Phase 0 of ETH 2.0 due to early risks, adding that staking ETH at launch is even riskier.
“I suppose first of all is that I personally don’t expect Phase 0 participation to be for everybody. Staking comes with many risks and staking early in eth2 comes with even more than if you jumped in a couple of years down the line,” Danny Ryan responded.
On The Contrary
In a contrary opinion, another long thread was started on Twitter by the creator of Eth Gas Station creator. In the thread of tweets, @latetot explained why he will be staking on Beacon Chain.
According to @latetot, the response to the first Medalla bug was very fast and eth2 teams have been responsive to the community members:
“My ETH can either lie dormant in a cold wallet earning no income, staked in a smart contract with its own risk of loss, or staked as a ETH2.0 validator. The audits, formal verification, and scrutiny of the ETH2.0 contracts give me strong confidence in the safety of ETH2.0.”
Join us on Twitter
Join us on Telegram
Join us on Facebook