A total of 2.3 Ethereum per minute or $6,600 is being consumed at the current rate.
By using the new transaction fee mechanism, which was implemented as part of Ethereum’s London upgrade on August 5, approximately 2.3 ETH is burned every minute.
Last week, the much-anticipated London hard fork went live, ushering in the EIP-1559 upgrade, which adjusted gas fees, into the world. In the course of making that adjustment, a mechanism was implemented that allows some of the base fees collected to be burned.
Following the upgrade, which went live around 14 hours ago, according to the various counters available, the total amount of ETH burned is approximately 3,395 ETH. At an average burn rate of 2.36 ETH per minute, Etherchain is reporting.
Assuming current prices of ETH are correct, this equates to approximately $395,000 in ETH being burned every hour, or $6,596 per minute.
Ultrasound is a different type of counter. Money has reported a total burn of 3,390 ETH, which is worth a whopping $9.5 million at the current ETH price of around $2,800, according to their records.
According to the tracker, the popular NFT marketplace OpenSea is the top ETH burner, having destroyed 374 ETH, or slightly more than $1 million dollars, since the upgrade was launched in November.
At the time of writing, Uniswap’s version 2 had burned 263 ETH, or $740,000, putting it in second place in the overall rankings. Hayden Adams, the founder of Uniswap, commented on the burn rate, stating that if things continue at their current pace, the protocol could burn as much as 350,000 ETH, or nearly $1 billion, per year.
Several figures were thrown around in the Bankless DeFi newsletter in an attempt to predict the impact on future supply. Given that the base fee can range anywhere between 25 percent and 75 percent of the total transaction fee, manual calculations and predictions are difficult to come up with accurately.
Based on data on fees generated in 2021, it calculated burn rates within this range and came to the following conclusion:
It’s been 2 hours since the launch of EIP-1559
@Uniswap (v2+v3) is doing its part burning ~80 ETH so far
❤️❤️ At this rate, Uniswap alone is burning 350,000 ETH – close to $1b worth – per year
Congrats to everyone who made EIP-1559 happen. Huge win for Ethereum
— Hayden Adams (@haydenzadams) August 5, 2021“Annualizing these figures, this means that between 800,000 — 2.4 million ETH is projected to be burned in 2021.”
If the fee burning is combined with the reduction in block reward issuance as a result of the transition from proof-of-stake to the merge, Ethereum may experience deflationary supply, which would allow it to fulfill the increasingly popular meme of “ultrasound money.”