On October 27, Ethereum's lead developer Raul Jordan said Altair's update on the Beacon Chain had been successfully rolled out.
Ethereum stakers didn't have to take any action as the improvements are all being made in the background, but validators need to be careful. The Altair update is another step towards the full launch of ETH 2.0, Phase 0 and the highly anticipated “merger”.
The update comes nearly a year after Beacon Chain was activated and the staking. Ethereum client developer Preston Van Loon commented:
“The purpose was uninterrupted and participation dropped to 93,3% in the first Altair era (exact number to be confirmed). The participation is now over 95% ".
What is the Altair update
According to a release from the Ethereum Foundation (EF) earlier this year, Altair is an update that offers lightweight client support, minor patches to incentives, and idle loss accounting per validator. It also introduces an increase in severity of the cut and cleanup of validator rewards that take into account simplified state management.
Most of its features are behind the scenes updates that can now be applied after 11 months of successful Beacon Chain operations. It has been described by the EF as a "warm-up upgrade" for the chain and customers.
“Ethereum's proof-of-stake system has worked quite well since its inception, but before doing the high-stakes merge, customer teams want to go through the process of a live update to further test and prepare their code bases and the live system. "
After Altair, there will be no major changes to the blockchain until the "merger", which is expected in the first or second quarter of 2022. This is when the existing Ethereum 1.0 blockchain will be anchored to the ETH 2.0 chain.
At the time of writing, there were just over eight million ETH staked on the Beacon Chain. At current prices, this is worth around $ 32 billion.
The price of ETH falls below $ 4
The bullish development news did not stop ETH prices from falling below the psychological level of $ 4.000. According to Tradingview, ETH prices fell to $ 3.900 during Thursday morning's Asian trading session.
At the time of writing, they had recovered slightly to claim one quotation of 4 thousand dollars, but were trading down by 4,6% on the day. As usual, Ethereum is trading in the shadow of Bitcoin, which is also correcting itself from a recent all-time high.
