Ethereum (ETH) Burn

Since the London upgrade (5 Aug 2021), every Ethereum transaction pays two parts: a base fee the protocol sets from how full the previous block was — this part is destroyed; and a priority fee (tip) that goes to the validator. Since Dencun (13 Mar 2024) the blob fee paid by L2s posting data is destroyed too. There is no dead wallet, no buyback fund, no schedule: the ETH burned each day equals demand for block space times the gas price, decided by nobody and adjustable by nobody.

As of 3 Sep 2026 this ledger records 4,633,357 ETH destroyed over 1,855 days — 3.8% of the 122.0M total supply — worth $13.1B at burn-time prices (DefiLlama). The record day was 1 May 2022: 71,718 ETH burned in 24 hours as Yuga Labs sold Otherdeed land and gas spiked to thousands of gwei — a single day equal to 1.5% of all-time burn, and more than five times all of 2026 so far.

The yearly view tells the whole story. The last five months of 2021: 1.32M ETH, $5.1B — more dollars than every later year combined. 2022: 1.48M, the record in tokens. 2023: 1.09M, with a 14,597 ETH peak day on 5 May when PEPE dragged mainnet into a memecoin frenzy. 2024: 634k, split cleanly by Dencun — the 30 days before the upgrade averaged 5,141 ETH a day, the 30 days after 3,027, and by August 434. 2025: 91k, peak day 4,275 ETH on 19 Jan (the TRUMP token weekend). 2026 through 2 Sep: 13,801 ETH, 56 a day on average, with the lowest day ever recorded at 5.7 ETH (6 Dec 2025).

An overlooked number: 2.62M of the 4.63M ETH — 57% — burned in the 13 months before the Merge (Sep 2022). The four years since the Merge add up to just 2.01M. The Ethereum of the "ultrasound money" era was NFTs, memecoins and DeFi jostling on a single chain with 15M-gas blocks; today's Ethereum has 45M-gas blocks, cheap blobs for L2s, and most retail activity has left mainnet. Low burn is not a broken network — it is a network that is no longer congested.

Unlike BNB or HYPE, ETH has a continuous counter-flow: the protocol issues new ETH to validators, currently ~2,930 ETH a day (1.07M a year) on 42.9M ETH locked in the beacon chain — 35% of total supply. Stakers receive it (roughly 2.5–3% a year); holders who do not stake are diluted by exactly that amount. The Mint column in the daily table is this flow, and the balance card above is the difference between the two.

The balance has flipped for good. In 2023, 259 of 362 days burned more than they minted — supply genuinely shrank. 2024 had 83 such days, almost all before Dencun. 2025 had exactly three: 19–20 Jan and 3 Feb. 2026 so far: none. ETH's last deflationary day was 3 Feb 2025 (3,410 burned, 2,590 minted). Cumulative since the Merge: 2.01M burned, 3.49M minted, supply up 1.48M — matching the measured rise from 120.52M at the Merge to 122.01M today. Over the last twelve months 24,294 ETH burned against 1,005,159 minted: the burn offsets just 2.4% of issuance.

Because burn = gas used × base fee while issuance is nearly fixed, the base fee at which burn equals issuance can be computed directly: about 13.4 gwei at current gas usage (ultrasound.money calls it the "barrier"). The average base fee over the last 24 hours was 0.116 gwei — 115 times below break-even. Through 2021–2022 the base fee routinely sat at 50–200 gwei; put differently, for ETH to turn deflationary again mainnet would need to be a hundred times more congested than now, or demand would have to return to mainnet from the L2s.

Three reasons the base fee fell, none of them temporary. One, blobs (EIP-4844) gave L2s their own near-free data lane instead of competing for gas with ordinary transactions. Two, the block gas limit rose from 30M to 45M in 2025 — same demand, wider blocks, lower base fee by design. Three, retail activity moved to L2s and other chains. Ethereum chose to scale by selling space more cheaply, and the price of that choice is the burn. This ledger does not forecast; it measures: any week the base fee clears 13 gwei, the balance column flips sign.

The 1,855-day burn series from 5 Aug 2021 is built from per-block base fees (Dune), matching Etherscan's BurntFees counter within 0.006%. From late Aug 2026 that Etherscan counter began updating only every 1–2 days and one re-index made the mint column jump 1.3M in a day, so the most recent 30 days switch to: burn = DefiLlama's daily burned USD divided by ETH's closing price (±2%), mint = the change in total supply measured by ultrasound.money plus the burn. Total supply, staked ETH and the break-even fee also come from ultrasound.money. ETH has no unlocks and no buybacks, so those sections are absent here; "Value burned" in the state card uses the price at the time the page was last updated, while the $13.1B in this article is at burn-time prices.