ETH Weekly Report | Grayscale resumes the private placement subscription of the Ethereum Trust Fund; institutional demand for Ethereum continues to grow (1.25-1.31)

Author | Qin Xiaofeng

1. Overall overview

Produced | Odaily

1. Overall overview

Grayscale officially tweeted that starting from 5:00 on January 30th, Beijing time, the Grayscale Ethereum Trust Fund (ETHE) resumed its private placement subscription. The Trust offers private placements from time to time throughout the year and is now available for daily subscriptions by accredited investors.

Second, the secondary market

Second, the secondary market

1. Spot market

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(ETH daily chart, picture from OKEx)

(ETH daily chart, picture from OKEx)

image description                                                         

(data from BiNuNiu)

(data from BiNuNiu)

(data from Tokenview)                                     

(data from Tokenview)

Tokenview dataIt shows that the number of transfers on the chain dropped sharply last week, the number of large-value transfers of "above 5,000 ETH" and "above 10,000 ETH" increased by 8% and 20% month-on-month, respectively, and the number of large-amount transfers of "above 50,000 ETH" decreased by 51.85% month-on-month %, the frequency of giant whale account transactions has dropped significantly.

OKlink data3. Ecology and technology

3. Ecology and technology

1. Technological progress

1. Technological progress

(1) Data: Ethereum 2.0 contract balance added 10,700 ETH

OKLink data shows that as of 24:00 on January 31, the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract address has received 2888066ETH.

(2) ETH 2.0 is expected to undergo a small-scale network upgrade in the middle of the year

• ConsenSys developer Ben Edgington issued a post announcing the content of the Ethereum developer meeting on January 14. According to this article, ETH 2.0 is expected to undergo a minor network upgrade mid-year. The specific upgrade contents are:

• Reset slash penalty, restore idle state to original value;

• Introducing synchronous committees to support light clients, which builds on the existing committee infrastructure;

• accounting reform. Extend all proof reward and penalty processing at the end of the epoch to the entire epoch. One of the goals is to reduce the number of false authentications at the beginning of the epoch, and there are also some small changes in rewards;

• Global quotient penalty. A global divisor will be defined, and the balances of all validators can be adjusted together by changing only the divisor;

Revised fork selection rules based on some recent research.

Ben Edgington said that this upgrade will be a good warm-up, after which the official will carry out larger tasks (sharding and merging). At the same time, after this upgrade, the main tasks of ETH 2.0 are: data sharding and data availability; the merger of Eth1 and Eth2 (making Eth1 enter the proof of stake). The current leading candidate is the executable Beacon Chain; Ethereum's lightweight client2.

The EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine)-compatible smart contract development language Fe launched by the Ethereum Foundation released its first Alpha version, version number 0.1.0, code-named Amethyst, and then the Fe project will release new versions every month. Fe was previously run by Christoph Burgdorf, a software engineer at the Ethereum Foundation.

2. Voice of the Community

2. Voice of the Community

(1) Ethereum announced the postponement of the Devcon conference originally scheduled to be held in August this year

On January 27, the official Ethereum blog posted that the Devcon conference will be postponed and will no longer be held in August. The Devcon team expects to announce a new date soon as vaccine supplies increase and the COVID-19 situation improves.

Swarm, a decentralized storage protocol based on Ethereum, plans to release version 1.0 in the second quarter

3. Project trends

（1）Swarm, a decentralized storage protocol based on Ethereum, plans to release version 1.0 in the second quarter

Swarm, a decentralized storage protocol based on Ethereum, said that the next important milestone, Swarm 1.0, is expected to be released in the second quarter of this year, and regular updates will be released at intervals of about 14 days before that. In addition, Swarm plans to carry out incentive activities on the Ethereum Goerli test network in advance to conduct simulation tests for token economics, and also plans to carry out hackathon activities from February 8th to 14th.

On January 26, according to official news, the Ethereum 2.0 pledge protocol Lido announced the launch of liquidity mining on SushiSwap. Users can obtain SUSHI rewards by providing LDO-ETH liquidity, and the APY can reach 25%.

(3) StarkWare launches ZK Rollup expansion solution StarkNet

StarkWare expects to deploy Phase 1 in the coming months and move into Phases 2 and 3 by the end of 2021. StarkNet built by StarkWare is a decentralized two-layer ZK Rollup driven by STARK, which can support the general computing of Ethereum.

4. Borrowing

Defipulse4. Borrowing

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5. Mining                           

(data from etherchain.org)

etherchain.orgsecondary title

4. News

4. News

(1) Analysis: The launch of ETH futures by CME may start the next upward trend of ETH

The launch of ETH futures by CME may start the next upward trend of ETH. Although ETH retail transactions are mainly conducted through encrypted exchanges, many people also invest through Grayscale. The ETHE premium may be a false indicator of retail demand. Therefore, the launch of ETH futures by CME will not only attract institutional investment in ETH, but also cause retail FOMO sentiment to push up prices. All of these factors combined will determine how strong Ethereum’s next uptrend will be. According to previous news, CME will launch Ethereum futures on February 8, 2021. (AMBCrypto)

(2) Coinbase report: institutional demand for Ethereum is growing

According to Coinbase’s 2020 Year in Review report, institutional demand for Ethereum is growing as corporate investment in Bitcoin continues to grow. According to researchers at Coinbase Institutional, while the exchange’s customers primarily bought bitcoin last year, a growing number of them are also holding ethereum positions. Most of Coinbase’s institutional clients view ethereum as a “decentralized computing network” that shares some key properties of bitcoin. For owning ethereum, these clients see the asset's potential as a "combination" of store of value and digital commodity that is critical to driving transactions on ethereum. Many believe that the growing interest in DeFi is the main reason for the surge in the price of Ethereum. Coinbase customers believe that ethereum could become the main settlement network underpinning this new financial system. (AMBCrypto)

(3) CoinMetrics Report: Institutional Investors Begin to Buy Ethereum

The CoinMetrics report shows that ethereum’s realized market capitalization increased by nearly 50% in January to hit an all-time high of around $70 billion. The number of addresses holding more than 10,000+ ETH increased by 5%, with 1,241 wallets currently holding more than $13.8 million in ETH. According to CoinMetrics, this shows that institutional investors are starting to buy Ethereum. (Cointelegraph)

(4) The United Nations Postal Administration launched a digital stamp based on the Ethereum blockchain

(5) Grayscale resumes the private placement subscription of the Ethereum Trust Fund

Grayscale officially tweeted that starting from 5:00 on January 30th, Beijing time, the Grayscale Ethereum Trust Fund (ETHE) resumed its private placement subscription. The Trust offers private placements from time to time throughout the year and is now available for daily subscriptions by accredited investors.