Ethereum After 1559: Network Participants Burn Over 300,000 Ether Worth More Than $1 Billion

On August 5, 2021, the Ethereum network and its participants successfully completed the highly anticipated London upgrade, which saw the implementation of the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)-1559. Since then, 303,681 ether worth more than a billion U.S. dollars have been burned.

More Than 300K Ether Burned Following EIP-1559

More than a billion dollars worth of ethereum (ETH) has been burned to date, after the London upgrade was implemented 42 days ago. The biggest changes added to the Ethereum blockchain included EIP-1559 and EIP-3554. While EIP-3554 changed the difficulty bomb, EIP-1559 changed Ethereum’s fee rate to a new scheme that makes the crypto asset ether deflationary.

Essentially, fees are standardized and calculated based on network demand, as a transaction pricing mechanism introduces a base fee for every block found on the network. The remainder of the fees will be burned and ether proponents assume this will significantly reduce the overall supply of ethereum. As of today, September 16, 2021, the Ethereum network has burned 303,681 ether worth over $1 billion using Thursday’s ether exchange rates.

Opensea Still Largest Burner, Stablecoin Transfers Add to the Burn Pile

The biggest burners in the network are people transferring ether from one address to another and decentralized applications (dapps) and decentralized finance (defi) platforms as well. The largest ether burner today is the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Opensea as Dune Analytics stats show the market has burned 42,991 ether worth $146.1 million today. Opensea is followed by traditional ether transfers which have added 25,514 ether to the burn pile.

Uniswap V2 and the stablecoin project Tether (USDT) command the third and fourth positions in terms of the top ether burners. To date, the second version of the Uniswap decentralized exchange (dex) has burned 16,665 ether worth $55.8K. Tether’s stablecoin USDT has added 15,015 ether to the burn pile as it is responsible for burning $51 million. Other top burners include Axie Infinity, Uniswap V3, Metamask, the stablecoin project USDC, and Opensea’s registry.