Ethereum Price: $176.70
Ethereum Price (BTC): 0.021931BTC
Market Cap: $19.09B
ETH Network Dominance*: 71.32%
7 Day Candle**: $172.31 / $186.34 / $167.92 / $176.70

Devcon V, the largest developer conference in the industry, starts tomorrow and runs until October 11th. The conference, which is setup by the Ethereum Foundation and entirely dedicated to the Ethereum blockchain, will have a major focus on ETH 2 during its 4 days in Osaka, Japan. Anticipation is building for more details regarding the Beacon Chain deposit contract which is tipped to go live in a matter of weeks. For those not familiar, the Beacon Chain deposit contract is where ETH will be staked for validating the Ethereum network – a major overhaul to how the blockchain operates and one that could see early adopters taking home a 34% annual yield (trending towards 2% over time).

ETH 2 isn’t the only topic getting attention. The conference’s agenda is filled with talks, panels and discussions ranging from enterprise Ethereum (Paul Brody from EY will be speaking about the company’s Nightfall project) and public chain privacy through to Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM), decentralized finance and gaming. The 4 day agenda is packed with content and one which gives a small window into this incredibly diverse and pioneering developer community. Expect crickets from the Ethereum sceptics this week.

– Nick, Owner EthereumPrice.org

USDC Stablecoin Earns 1.25% at Coinbase

Ethereum-based stablecoin USDC now earns its holders interest when kept at Coinbase. As part of the company’s push towards enabling blockchain-based finance for their customers, USDC is now income generating for its holders. While the move is a step in the right direction, it’s lacking enormously when compared to other blockchain equivalents. Compound.finance’s cDAI stablecoin will earn interest no matter where it is kept, and interest rates have been as high as 11% (although not without a greater level of risk of course). It’s also very unclear how the USDC earnings are rewarded – cDAI earns interest for its holders at every block (roughly every 15 seconds) while USDC pays monthly with no transparent method for verifying/auditing the mechanism.

Despite the comparative drawbacks, Coinbase is creating yet more interest-earnings tools in the Ethereum space at a time where traditional banks are looking closer at the viability of negative rates. This change to USDC is also part of a much bigger vision for Coinbase, where its users can expect an ecosystem of decentralized finance instruments to use in their customer account.

Pymastic Labs Releases ETH 2 Beta Client

Those looking to stake in Ethereum 2.0 and earn validator rewards are now able to join the open beta of the Prysm ETH 2 client. The client operates on the Goerli test network (not real ETH) and allows validators to deposit test ETH and generate rewards in preparation of the launch of main net. Prysm is one of several ETH 2 client implementations which are all working towards the launch of Phase 0 in Q1 2020.

While staking real ETH in Phase 0 will be a one way trip (unable to withdraw the ETH until later phases), those early to staking may find themselves earning higher than expected rewards.

IKEA Makes Use of Ethereum Smart Contracts

Last week, with the help of supply chain payments firm Tradeshift, IKEA was able to settle an invoice using Icelandic krona on the Ethereum blockchain. The activity itself is fairly bland; issuing an invoice on Ethereum which is then settled on Ethereum is about as vanilla as it gets, however the development is yet another indicator of the interest that this blockchain is generating among enterprise. Tradeshift went further into their reasoning for the transaction and the business challenges that Ethereum (blockchain) solves on their blog.

* calculated as: (ETH Market Cap / Ethereum Network Market Cap)
** open / high / low / close