Internet Computer (ICP) Burn

On ICP, canisters (smart contracts) pay for compute and storage in cycles, pegged to the IMF's XDR: 1 trillion cycles = 1 XDR (~$1.30) regardless of ICP's price. To get cycles, a developer sends ICP to the NNS Cycles Minting Canister, which destroys the ICP and mints cycles at the prevailing ICP/XDR rate. That destruction is the Burn record on the ledger — what this ledger counts. ICP transfer fees (0.0001 ICP per transaction) are also destroyed but are negligible.

As of 3 Sep 2026: 2,891,713 ICP burned; total supply 556,203,582 (469,213,710 at genesis + 89,881,585 minted − burned). Supply is up 18.5% since genesis; burning has offset 3.2% of minting.

Burn by year: 2021 (from 11 May) 10,988; 2022 87,012; 2023 57,846; 2024 561,127; 2025 1,670,173 — the peak year at 4,576/day; 2026 to 31 Aug 498,292 (2,042/day). The first three years total 155,846 ICP — 5.4% of the total — meaning 94.6% of lifetime burning happened in the last 24 months.

In the first eight months of 2024 ICP burned 1,194–4,583 per month, a median of 67 ICP/day — a compute network barely consuming ICP. On 9 Sep 2024 it jumped to 4,637, 10 Sep 10,912, 13 Sep 21,629 (the record at the time), and September closed at 141,083 — 50× August. It never went back: October 104,243, November 133,093, December 165,384; the last four months of 2024 make up 97% of the year.

DFINITY summarized 2024's cycle-burn rate as up "over 8,800%"; this ledger can only record the result on the ledger and cannot identify which application drove the step — the Burn series carries no sender name. What is measurable: the lowest burn day of 2025 was 422 ICP, higher than the highest day of the first seven months of 2024 — the new floor sits above the old ceiling.

2025 opened with the four strongest months ever: January 271,704; February 288,852 (the record month, 10,316/day); March 239,533; April 197,380 — 997K ICP in 120 days, 34% of the lifetime total. Then it faded: June 112,244, July 85,395, and from September to December 2025 only 39–46K per month. In between came 29 Aug 2025: 89,471 ICP in one day, 70× the day before, 3.1% of five years of burning — the all-time record, nearly triple the second-highest day (6 Feb 2026: 30,852).

The 2026 daily series is sawtoothed: week of 5 Jan 18,874, week of 12 Jan 8,948, week of 19 Jan 23,996; week of 2 Feb 34,614 then week of 9 Feb 3,443; week of 16 Mar 35,667 then week of 23 Mar 5,377; week of 4 May 49,617 (the year's highest) then week of 18 May 6,090. Every day above 30K ICP is in 2026 (6 Feb, 9 May, 19 Mar, 11 Apr) or is the 2025 record, and each sits between days of 400–700 ICP.

An analysis on the DFINITY forum (Aug 2026) dissected the large burning addresses and found the cause: most of a busy day's burn is a few accounts' recurring cycles top-ups — one account burned exactly 4,107.55 ICP ten times at 30-day intervals, then after receiving 17,721 ICP on 10 Jun 2026 switched to weekly round-number top-ups (4,500 on 15 Jun, 3,625 on 24 Jun, 3,800 on 31 Jul, 3,750 on 7 Aug); another shared payment service had burned 61,500 ICP, funded by 37 sources including 21,100 ICP from the OpenChat SNS treasury. The post's conclusion: "the cadence did not accelerate because consumption grew — the money arrived in a lump and is being spent down."

2026 monthly totals: 82,763 / 67,557 / 81,084 / 61,882 / 100,027 / 30,300 / 24,818 / 49,103 (January → August). The first half averaged 2,640/day; June–August only 1,130/day; July 2026 (24,818) is the lowest month since August 2024. Trailing-12-month burn is 665,879 ICP — 60% below the 12 months before.

ICP is minted for two things: NNS neuron voting rewards and monthly node-provider pay. This ledger derives mint = Δ total supply + burn from the same ledger-api: 2021 (235 days) 6.62M; 2022 17.47M; 2023 19.35M; 2024 15.97M; 2025 19.82M; 2026 to 31 Aug 10.62M (43.5K/day, ≈ 15.9M a year, 2.9% of supply). 89.88M in total since genesis, 31× the amount burned.

But the ledger only sees rewards when they are withdrawn: voting rewards accrue inside neurons as off-ledger "maturity" and become ICP only when the neuron owner disburses them. That makes daily minting lumpy — 20 Dec 2025 minted 2.05M, 10 Dec 2025 1.32M, 3 Aug 2022 1.74M, 5 Aug 2023 1.47M — and ledger minting (3.7% in 2025) far below the 9.72% inflation DFINITY itself published in January 2026, which counts maturity granted but not yet withdrawn. The gap is future issuance this table has not recorded yet.

Ledger mint-to-burn ratios: trailing 12 months 19.41M minted versus 665,879 burned — 29:1; 90 days 31:1; 30 days 21:1 thanks to a decent August. Breaking even against ledger minting alone would need ~43K ICP burned a day — half the 29 Aug 2025 record, every day.

Dominic Williams' Mission 70 whitepaper (13 Jan 2026) targets cutting ICP inflation from 9.72% to ~2.92% by end-2026 on two fronts: cutting voting and node rewards so issuance falls to 5.42% a year by January 2027 (−44%), and raising the cycle-burn rate 15-fold — from 0.05 to 0.77 XDR per second — through the Caffeine AI platform and "Cloud Engines" burning 20% of revenue. The NNS approved the reward-change package on 7 Apr 2026.

The ledger shows the burn half moving the wrong way: 0.77 XDR per second is ~66,500 XDR a day, about 35K ICP burned daily at early-September-2026 prices; August 2026 actually ran 1,584/day and July 801 — a 22–44× gap. The cycle-burn rate measured on 19 Mar 2026 was 0.069 trillion cycles per second, 9% of target. The supply half will be measurable in the Mint column from late this year: 2026 minting (43.5K/day) is already 20% below 2025 (54.3K/day), but mostly from maturity-withdrawal timing, not yet from the new reward schedule.

This ledger does not forecast whether Mission 70 succeeds; it records the two numbers that must change for the target to be real: the Burn column must multiply by tens and the Mint column must nearly halve, both within 16 months of the announcement.

CoinGecko lists 556.2M circulating — equal to total supply, no max; ICP has no remaining vesting under this count, and this ledger has no unlock-schedule source for ICP (the Unlocks column is empty). Supply pressure comes from maturity awaiting withdrawal and monthly node rewards, not from an unlock schedule.

ATH $700.65 on 10 May 2021 — listing day, one day before the burn series begins; ATL $2.00 on 1 Aug 2026, one month before this reading. Peak to trough the price fell 99.7%; total supply rose 18.5%; the lifetime burn equals 15 days of ledger minting.

The sole source is DFINITY's ledger-api.internetcomputer.org: the cumulative icp-burned series (in e8s) and supply/total per day since 11 May 2021. Daily burn = difference between consecutive points; mint = Δ supply + burn. State reads the latest points of the same API. Verification: the week of 4 May 2026 reads 49,617 ICP versus 49,900 in press coverage (0.6% off); total supply matches CoinGecko to 0.00005%.

The ledger deliberately does not back-derive from the cycle-burn-rate metric via the XDR rate: that method yields 3.24M ICP where the ledger records 2.89M — a 12% gap, because cycles minted (ICP already burned) are not necessarily spent, and cycles spent may come from ICP burned months earlier. Nor does it count undisbursed maturity as mint. USD in the state card = quantity × price at the time the page was last updated.