Ethereum Was Just Overtaken By Terra In This Key Metric

Ethereum ETH/USD — the world's second-biggest cryptocurrency and the one that introduced smart contracts (enabling decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens, among other things) — was just overtaken by a novel cryptocurrency in a key metric.

What happened: Staking Rewards data shows that Ethereum just moved one place lower in the ranking of the cryptocurrencies with the highest value of total staked assets.

With its current total staked value of just under $28 billion, Ethereum ranked second until it was just recently overtaken by smart contract blockchain Terra LUNA/USD with a total value of staked assets of over $29.62 billion. Both of those assets are far behind Solana's SOL/USD total staked value of nearly $39 billion.

See Also: IS TERRA (LUNA) A GOOD INVESTMENT?

Terra features a particularly high annual staking yield of 6.8% as compared to Ethereum's 4.81%, which is likely a key factor in Terra amassing such a large amount of staked capital. Solana finds itself somewhere in between, with a yield of 5.94%.

Furthermore, Ethereum is expected to transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain in the first half of 2022, which will likely cause the value of its staked capital to skyrocket when it moves away from mining. The shift has been projected to cut energy use by 99.95%.

ETH Price Action: As of press time, Ethereum is trading at $2,937 after seeing its price drop by about 0.8% over the last 24 hours.

Photo: Courtesy of Antonio Gonzalo on Flickr