With three days left until the end of 2021, the Ethereum network and its native token ether have had a phenomenal year as ether has increased more than 450% in value in 12 months. 145 days ago, on August 5, the Ethereum network implemented the London hard fork and since that day, 1,283,226 ether worth close to $5 billion has been burned.
Burning $5 Billion in Ether in 4 Months
Around four months ago, Ethereum implemented the London upgrade which added a number of new rule-sets to the chain. The most transformative included EIP-1559, an Ethereum rule-set improvement that created a new fee rate scheme allowing the network to burn a portion of ether.
“The algorithm results in the base fee per gas increasing when blocks are above the gas target, and decreasing when blocks are below the gas target. The base fee per gas is burned,” EIP-1559’s description notes.
As of today, December 28, 2021, 1.28 million ether has been destroyed by the burn process, which equates to close to $5 billion in USD value using today’s ETH/USD exchange rate. The amount of value burned to-date is 31.57% higher than what had been burned on November 24, when the burn rate crossed 1 million ether. Estimates indicate that there’s 118,926,664 ether in circulation today.
NFT Platform Opensea Burns the Most Ether
The biggest burner has been the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Opensea as it has burned 134,126 ether worth $498 million across 9.5 million transactions. Traditional ether transfers by network participants burned 122,365 ether since August 5, which equates to $483 million using today’s ETH exchange rates. The decentralized exchange (dex) Uniswap v2 has burned 112,159 ether worth $457 million.
The stablecoin tether (USDT), used on Ethereum, has burned 67,932 ether worth $268 million and Uniswap v3 has burned 42,020 ether worth $167 million. The top five ETH burners are followed by Metamask (29.2K ether burned), USDC (25.9K ether burned), Axie Infinity (16.7K ether burned), Sushiswap (15.1K ether burned), and the Opensea Registry (14.8K ether burned).
What do you think about the 1.2 million ether burned since August 5? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.