Nearly $10B Is Bet on Pending Revamp of Ethereum

Close to $10 billion — or roughly 3.2 million Ether tokens — has been deposited on decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Lido Finance in preparation for a revamp of Ethereum.

As Bloomberg reported Friday (April 15), the long-gestating software upgrade — known as the Merge and planned for later in the year — is designed to provide sweeping cuts in energy use, improve performance and provide greater returns on the popular blockchain.

Read more: Ethereum 2.0 Project Enters Final Stretch, Promising Massive Scalability by Summer

The bet is being made using a practice called “staking,” which gives owners a way to earn passive income without selling their tokens. Staked coins can help validate transactions and keep the network secure in exchange for rewards, based partially on the number of tokens minted and fees collected.

See more: What is Staking?

Lido, launched at the end of 2020, has beaten out larger players in the industry, the report stated, by offering Ether owners an incentive in the form of a token called stETH, which is tied to the value of the cryptocurrency and can be used on other decentralized applications.

The report cited data from blockchain tracker Nansen, which said there is more than 700,000 stETH sitting on decentralized lending project Aave.

Depending on the size of the risk a stETH holder is willing to take, the rewards of staking Ether borrowed against stETH on Aave could — in theory — have no limit, according to the report. The downside? If the Merge is held up, and people holding stETH scrambled to exchange their coins for Ether, the token could be in danger of being unpegged, which could lead to a plunge in value.

The architects of the project have said it will be ready to scale by summer. As PYMNTS reported last month, the project began in 2016, and has seen some extreme delays which have nevertheless failed to dampen enthusiasm for a new Ethereum.