It has been nearly two years, or 23 months, since the activation of the Ethereum “London” hard fork, which marked the implementation of Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559. This upgrade introduced the continuous burning of the base transaction fee in the Ethereum network.
Current data indicates that since the implementation of this hard fork, a total of over 3.46 million ethers have been burned. Considering the exchange rates of ETH, the total value of the destroyed ether amounts to $6.68 billion. This means that on average, more than 146,000 ethers are taken out of circulation each month since the implementation of EIP-1559.
To provide a clearer perspective on the scale of the burned ether’s value, the amount of $6.68 billion could purchase approximately 19,085 houses, with each house being valued at an average of $350,000.
EIP-1559 paved the way for a deflationary model for Ethereum, continuously reducing the overall supply of ETH. Regular ETH transfers made the most significant contribution to Ethereum’s contraction, burning nearly 300,000 ETH. Additionally, transactions involving NFTs on Opensea resulted in the burning of over 230,000 ethers, while Uniswap v2 reduced circulating supply by almost 200,000 ethers.
Transactions involving Tether led to the destruction of over 150,000 ETH, and combined, Uniswap v3 and v1 contributed to the burning of over 200,000 ETH. Currently, there are 120 million ETH in circulation, with an approximate value of $232.53 billion.
Since the implementation of EIP-1559, slightly over 3 million ETH has been mined. If the Merge had not occurred, the network would have generated 6.5 million ethers. Furthermore, if the blockchain had remained on the Proof-of-Work model and avoided the implementation of EIP-1559, an additional 9.9 million ETH would have been added to the existing 120 million ETH.
