Ethereum After 1559: Network Nears 2 Million ETH Burned Worth Over $6.9 Billion

Approximately 205 days ago, the Ethereum network upgraded via the London hard fork which implemented the packaged Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559. Since then, the EIP-1559 upgrade made it so a fraction of gas is destroyed during the transaction process and to date, 1,915,220 ether has been burned worth over $6.9 billion using today’s exchange rates.

Ethereum Burn Rate Inches Closer to 2 Million Burned, 3.57 Ether Is Burned Every Minute

The Ethereum (ETH) network has burned approximately 1,915,220 ethereum and the metric is nearing the two million mark. Since the EIP-1559 improvement was added on August 5, 2021, the community has been observing how much ether is being burned on a daily basis. At the time of writing, the 24-hour burn rate is 3.57 ether per minute or around $9,809.16 every 60 seconds.

EIP-1559 essentially changes the algorithm tethered to the base fee per gas in the protocol and it burns the base fee per gas. Ethereum advocates have been fans of the idea because it makes ethereum (ETH) deflationary over time. When the London hard fork was implemented, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin told Bloomberg that EIP-1559 was the most important part of London.

“Now it gets much easier to send a transaction that will get included in the next block and that’s very important to user experience,” Buterin explained at the time.

Gas Fees Remain Dynamic, Opensea the Largest Ether Burning Entity

Weeks after the London upgrade, EIP-1559 did not seem to affect the high gas fees users dealt with while trying to send on-chain (layer one) transactions. In fact, the very next month after the London upgrade, ETH’s average gas fees skyrocketed to $59 per transaction. The average gas fee to push an ethereum (ETH) transfer today is much lower, at 0.006 ETH ($16.61) per transaction or 31.3 gwei.

Meanwhile, as the network has destroyed $6.9 billion in ether via EIP-1559, the biggest on-chain gas burner is the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Opensea. At the time of writing, the leading NFT market has burned approximately 229,916 ether worth $790,499,348 across 14,635,232 ETH transfers.

Ordinary ethereum transactions make up the second-largest gas-burning entity with 178,166 ether destroyed to date. Large ETH-burning entities following Opensea and ordinary ethereum transfers include protocols and platforms like Uniswap v2, Tether (USDT), Swaprouter 2, Uniswap v3, and Metamask.