Valid Points: A Year in Review by Your Eth 2.0 Staking Experts - CoinDesk

In less than 48 hours, 2020 will be behind us.

It almost seems too big a task to recount all that has happened in this world, in this industry and in our own personal lives but our colleague Brad Keoun, editor of CoinDesk’s daily cryptocurrency markets newsletter, First Mover, offers an excellent start to summarizing 2020. He writes:

“This year saw the biggest drop-off in economic activity since the Great Depression, the biggest money-printing episode in the Federal Reserve’s 107-year history, an epochal shift toward remote working, negative prices for crude-oil futures and the first real signs the global financial system might be migrating toward fast-growing markets for cryptocurrencies and digital assets.”

2020 also saw an explosive growth in the total value locked and user activity for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on Ethereum. We witnessed the genesis of Ethereum’s primary scaling solution with the launch of Ethereum 2.0 and the emergence of an entirely new use case for ether through staking.

Where do we go from here? For today’s special, year-end edition of Valid Points, we’ve gathered commentary from the industry’s most well-known Eth 2.0 staking experts. They’ll be illustrating through charts what caught their attention most this past year and what they’ll be watching closely for in the next.

Ethereum: A year in review

Tim Ogilvie, Staked, on gas usage

Our first contribution is from Tim Ogilvie, the founder and CEO of Staked. Staked helps investors earn yield from staking and DeFi without taking custody of their crypto assets.

“My favorite Ethereum chart shows the daily gas usage. I love it because it’s one part of the great story that I expect will propel ETH over the next few years. There are three legs to the stool:

Our chart. People are using ETH with increasing frequency, driving increased gas demand.
EIP-1559, introducing Fee Burns. This is an upcoming Ethereum improvement that will take all of the gas demand and use it to burn ETH. The more ETH gets used, the more ETH supply gets burned.
Eth 2: Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake, allowing for low issuance of new supply while providing strong security guarantees.

“Bitcoin has an amazing story as an asset with a fixed supply of 21 million BTC. Ethereum’s story has the potential to be even stronger. If gas usage exceeds supply issuance, you’ve now got a digital asset with a steadily declining supply.

“My 2021 prediction: This becomes the dominant story around ETH’s valuation and it drives significant price appreciation.”

Jun Soo Kim, stake.fish, on Ethereum’s staking ecosystem

Next, we have the head of strategy and operations for stake.fish, Jun Soo Kim. With support for over 10 different blockchain networks, Jun Soo and his team are working to secure and contribute to an exciting new staking ecosystem and enable users to stake with confidence.