Ethereum has burned billions worth of ETH since its major upgrade in August, creating more pressure on the supply of the second-largest digital asset by market cap.
According to Ethereum supply tracking tool Watch the Burn, the Ethereum network has burned 853,381 ETH since the rollout of the London hard fork, which introduced the EIP-1559 protocol that permanently destroys certain amounts of ETH every time a user processes a transaction.
The amount of Ethereum burned so far is approximately equivalent to $4,040,000,000.
During the same period, $6.2 billion in ETH was issued as rewards to miners, leaving the network a net issuance equivalent to $2.2 billion.
Ethereum supply data from Etherchain shows that the network has torched ETH at a rate of $46,994 per minute over the past 24 hours. The network’s average base fee, or the price paid for a transaction on the network (“gas”), is 172.2 GWei at time of writing.
A fee-burning protocol was introduced during Ethereum’s latest major upgrade in order to create deflationary pressure on the supply and help boost the price of the token. ETH has since hit new all-time highs above $4,700.
With Ethereum on the rise, US banking giant JPMorgan says that investing in ETH looks more profitable than Bitcoin (BTC) this market cycle given the high number of decentralized applications (DApps) and use cases associated with the leading smart contract platform.
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