The staking contract for the Ethereum 2.0 blockchain is at present the single-largest holder of Ether (ETH).

Co-ordinate to blockchain analytics provider Nansen, the Eth2 staking contract has surpassed Wrapped Ethereum (wETH) to become the single largest holder of ETH. Unlike Ether, Wrapped Ether adheres to the ERC-20 standard, making it the favored representation of ETH among decentralized finance protocols that use ERC-20 tokens.

The findings were posted to Twitter by Alex Svanevik, CEO of blockchain analytics firm Nansen, on Tuesday. The data shows that the Beacon Chain's eolith contract holds 6.73 million ETH — worth roughly $21.v billion at current prices.

By dissimilarity, Nansen's data suggests the Wrapped Ethereum contract holds 6.7 million ETH ($21.4 billion), followed by Binance with two.29 one thousand thousand ETH ($7.iii billion).

The quantity of Ether locked and staked on Eth2 currently represents v.7% of Ethereum's circulating supply, co-ordinate to CoinMarketCap. There are now 210,000 validators for the Eth2 network, according to Beaconcha.in.

Currently, Ether staked on Eth2 is locked upwards and cannot be withdrawn from the contract until Ethereum's forthcoming concatenation merge, which will meld the Ethereum and Eth2 networks. The chain merge is currently expected to take place during the first half of 2022.

According to Staking Rewards, Eth2 is currently the third-largest proof-of-stake network by staked capitalization, ranking behind Cardano's $49 billion and Solana's $27.5 billion.

Related: Staked ETH Trust opens Ethereum staking to accredited investors

The news comes soon after a major milestone for Ethereum's Eth2 roadmap, with the network successfully deploying its London upgrades on Aug. 5.

The difficult fork contained the highly anticipated Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559, which introduced a base transaction fee that is burned from the supply into Ethereum's fee market place.

Co-ordinate to Ultrasound.Money, 54,916 ETH worth $175 million has been destroyed through transaction fees in the dozen days since London went live. At a current burn charge per unit of 3.28 ETH, more 140,000 ETH could be burned each month should network activity remain consistent.

At the time of writing, ETH prices had retreated 3.three% over the by 24 hours to trade at $3,180.