The Ethereum price ended its stagnation phase a few hours ago after the ETH2.0 start date, which had been eagerly awaited for many months, became known.

Before that, ETH’s price stagnated around $ 380, rising 10% immediately after traders got wind of the trend.

Ethereum 2.0 is intended to help solve the scalability problems that have plagued the network lately – and to help generate further benefits and promote acceptance among users and developers.

Traders clearly view this network upgrade as a bullish development.

From a technical point of view, one benefit that ETH 2.0 offers to Ethereum’s pricing policy is the staking feature, which is expected to lock in a sizable portion of the token’s circulating supply, which will help keep it moving higher .

Looking at the deposit address of the contract, it appears that the cryptocurrency has already locked a value of nearly $ 2 million, which shows a serious demand for ETH 2.0 nodes.

Ethereum 2.0 deployer starts, pushes ETH over $ 400

At the time of writing, Ethereum is trading around 4 percent higher at a current price of $ 402, a notable increase from its recent lows of $ 380 set a few hours ago.

The break above the $ 400 mark is technically significant as it could spark a rally that will allow ETH to gain some ground over Bitcoin, which has left all altcoins far behind in recent weeks.

The impetus for this upswing came from the use of the ETH 2.0 deposit contract, which signals that the eagerly awaited network upgrade will start in the near future.

The introduction of the contract was announced in a blog post yesterday, minutes before the price hike, which has enabled it to retake the crucial $ 400 region.

ETH 2.0 is already seeing token inflows for staking

Staking is one of the hallmarks of the 2.0 upgrade, which allows investors to deposit at least 32 ETH into a validator and receive network rewards.

These rewards are expected to be around 6-20 percent per year – but they depend on how many validators are running and how heavily the Ethereum network is used.

A total of 4,837 ETH are currently staked and the number is growing steadily.

For the start of the 2.0 network, a total of 524,288 Ethereum must be staked, which corresponds to a total of 16,384 validators.

The countdown to the launch of the Beacon Chain is now on, and the price of Ethereum may begin to rise in anticipation of its final launch.