Ethereum’s EIP-1559 update has now burned over 1 million ETH worth roughly $4.3 billion.
The number two crypto’s fee burning proposal shipped as part of the London hardfork on Aug. 5 and has rapidly diminished the supply of ETH amid a period of high activity on the network. EIP-1559 was introduced to make the cost of transactions more predictable as users were previously required to make a bid to miners to get their transactions added to a block. It added a base fee to every Ethereum transaction, which represents the minimum amount of gas that needs to be spent to add a transaction to a block (users can also add a tip for miners when they make a transaction). Crucially, the base fee gets burned with every transaction, in turn reducing the ETH supply.
According to data from ultrasound.money, Ethereum has now burned just over 1 million ETH at a rate of around 6 ETH per minute. The biggest contributor so far has been the NFT marketplace OpenSea with over 100,000 ETH burned, which can be explained by the growing interest in NFTs throughout this year. ETH transfers and trades on Uniswap V2 are ranked as the second and third biggest burners.
