Now that 2021 is coming to a close, it appears that the Ethereum network has had a fantastic year. For 12 months, the blockchain’s native token ether has grown over 450% in value. On August 5, about 145 days ago, the network carried out what we know today as the London hard fork. Since then, about 1,283,226 ether has been burned already, which amounts to nearly $5 billion in USD.
This Happened in Only Four Months
As mentioned, the network implemented the London upgrade about four months ago. This upgrade included several new rules to the blockchain. One of the most transformative rules was the EIP-1559, a rule-set improvement. With this new rule-set, Ethereum can create a brand-new fee rate scheme, ultimately helping the network burn a percentage of its ether coins.
As of December 28, 2021, about 1.28 million ether has been burned in this process. This amount is equivalent to almost $5 billion US dollars based on the current ETH/USD exchange rate. To date, the amount of burned ether is 31.57% more than the amount burned back on November 24. According to estimates, there is now 118,926,664 ether in circulation currently.
Opensea Burns the Most ETH
One of the biggest ether burners is Opensea, a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace. Notably, the marketplace has burned about 134,126 ether across 9.5 million transactions. When converted to USD, the amount reaches up to $498 million.
Since August 5, traditional ether transactions got to burn 122,365 ether ($483 million). On the other hand, the decentralized exchange known as Uniswap v2 burned 112,159 ether ($457 million).
