Ethereum 2.0 is approaching what some call a major milestone in its short history – 6 million ethers (ETH) deployed. Ethereum Launchpad, the Ethereum 2.0 portal for validators who insert their coins, showed around 5.9 million inserted ethers and almost 180,000 validators that power the blockchain on Wednesday.

This number is on average only slightly above the minimum deposit of 32 ethers required to activate the validator and become a validator on the network. This equates to an investment of $ 66,560 to participate as a validator on the network at the average cryptocurrency exchange price at the time of publication.

According to the Ethereum Foundation, validators are “responsible for storing data, processing transactions and adding new blocks to the blockchain”.

When Ethereum 2.0 went online for the first time in December 2020, the platform had to stake out at least 524,288 ETH before launch. In six months, Ethereum has grown with ten times more validators than the minimum network requirement decided by the platform last year.

ETH rebounded this week after rebounding $ 2,000 and above the critical support of $ 2,080 as of Monday noon (UTC). Traders and investors are optimistic about Ether as they eagerly await the London hard fork planned for July.

At current prices, 5.9 million plugged ethers have a market value of approximately $ 12.29 billion. This number represents the amount by which nearly 180,000 validators have blocked deposits in order to run the blockchain.

This qualifies them as well-intentioned participants in the network interested in following the rules and keeping behavior and malware off the Ethereum network.

Validators who fail to adhere to network protocols, go offline, or do not perform validation risk losing their staked ethers. Things that help the network obey the rules and reach consensus while processing requests from users will receive rewards that are credited to them on the blockchain.