The Total Ethereum Burned By EIP-1559 Surpass 210,000 ETH

The total amount of Ethereum burned by EIP-1559, an upgrade that burns transaction fees instead of returning them to miners, has surpassed 210,000 ETH (about $705 million at the prices at which it was burned).

A total of 210,671 ETH has been burned, worth some $707 million, according to ethburned.info. Currently 600 ETH, gets burned each hour.

EIP-1559 upgrade was introduced in early August as part of London Hard Fork to speed up the upgrade to Ethereum 2.0, the next generation version of Ethereum that transitions the blockchain from proof-of-work (PoW), a computationally intensive way of verifying transactions, to proof-of-stake (PoS), an environmentally-friendly algorithm that uses much less energy.

To do this, EIP-1559 destroys ETH from circulation instead of sending it back to the miners that validate transactions through proof-of-work computations. The move to EIP-1559 was naturally unpopular amongst miners who had invested money for graphics cards that are adept at mining Ethereum. 

Ethereum will “merge” with the proof-of-stake version of its blockchain later this year or early in 2022. But, it will take a few years before Ethereum 2.0 will have the same level of smart contract functionality as Ethereum 1.0.

One expected effect of EIP-1559 was that it would reduce the fees, or at least make them more predictable. However, fees on Ethereum are still sky high—and are getting higher due to the ongoing resurgence of NFT projects. 

A single swap on Uniswap for example can cost $76, and an ERC-20 transfer costs $25 at recent rates. The biggest gas guzzler is NFT marketplace OpenSea, which used 11.65% of all gas on the Ethereum network in the past 3 hours, and 15% in the past day.