$5.8 Billion Burned: Second Largest Crypto Network Records 2 Million Ethereum Destroyed in 7 Months

This week, the Ethereum network’s burn rate reached a milestone by surpassing 2 million ethereum burned worth $5.81 billion since August 5, 2021. Metrics show the crypto network has a 24-hour burn rate of 1.74 ether per minute, which equates to roughly $5K worth of ether destroyed every 60 seconds.

During the last year, the Ethereum (ETH) network has seen a slew of changes and seven months ago the network implemented the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 on August 5, 2021.

Ever since then, the network has been destroying ether at an extremely rapid rate, as EIP-1559 transformed the algorithm tethered to the base fee per gas in the protocol and it burns the base fee per gas. Ethereum advocates like the idea because it makes the crypto network’s supply deflationary.

At the time of writing, and since the August 5 introduction of EIP-1559, Ethereum has destroyed approximately 2,001,495.6 ETH. Using current exchange rates on March 21, 2022, the amount of ethereum burned is equivalent to $5.81 billion in USD value.

While more than 2 million ether has been burned, the speed of burn per day has been coasting along at 1.74 ether per minute or roughly $5,059.05 per minute using current ether exchange rates. Measuring the burn rate by hour shows the network destroys 1.51 ETH per minute.

On March 21, the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Opensea is the largest ether burner as the NFT market has destroyed 229,922 ether worth $790 million. Average, everyday ethereum transactions represent the second-largest burner as ETH transfers have destroyed 185,920 ether worth $674 million using today’s ETH exchange rates.

The decentralized exchange (dex) platform Uniswap v2 is the third-largest burner with 126,576 ether burned, and tether (USDT) transactions represent the fourth-largest burner with 92,325 ETH destroyed.

Other notable burners include Swaprouter, Uniswap v3, Metamask, and the stablecoin USDC. At the time of writing, ethereum has gained 59% during the last 12 months against the U.S. dollar and 13.6% over the last two weeks. In terms of market dominance among the 13,311 crypto assets in existence valued at $1.9 trillion, ethereum’s $348 billion market cap represents 17.8%.

On Monday, the average transaction fee on the Ethereum network is 0.0028 ETH or $8.15 per transfer. The current median-sized transaction fee on the Ethereum network is 0.0012 ETH or $3.60 per transaction.

What do you think about the 2 million ethereum burned so far? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.