Render Network (RENDER) Burn

Under Render's BME, each rendering or compute job is priced in USD, the renter pays the equivalent RENDER and that amount is destroyed when the job completes; node operators receive RENDER from the monthly emission pool, not from the renter. So burn is zero when nobody rents machines, and every RENDER destroyed is service revenue already collected — no transaction-fee burn, no buyback.

As of 3 Sep 2026: 1,766,462 RENDER burned over 913 burn days since 25 Nov 2023. Against the true supply of 568.0M, the burned share is 0.31%. Over the same period the network minted 17.94M RENDER — 10.2 minted for every 1 destroyed.

Burn by year: 2024 312,589 (1,028/day over 322 days with data); 2025 784,204 (2,184/day, +151%); 2026 to 31 Aug 669,656 (2,744/day, +26% on the 2025 pace). This is one of the few tokens in this ledger whose burn line has risen three years in a row — because it measures GPUs rented, not token price.

In the first half of 2024, after BME started, burning was sparse: April 2024 6,548 (285/day), July 4,507 (167/day — the low). From August 2024 the curve bent upward: 23,475 → 35,038 → 46,797 → 37,030 → December 2024 88,835 (2,866/day). 2025 kept going: 36–43K per month in Q1, 55–80K in Q2–Q3, then two months above 120K — September 2025 120,929 (the record, 4,837/day over 25 days with data) and December 2025 120,181.

2026 holds a higher base: January 60,022, February 66,275, March 110,755, April 116,111 (3,870/day — the highest daily average of any month), May 45,154, June 63,280, July 114,855, August 85,093. The first eight months of 2026 already double all of 2024 and equal 85% of all of 2025.

But the line is jagged because big jobs arrive in bursts: the 2026 daily median is 2,017 RENDER, while 17 Jul 2026 burned 50,594 — the record day, 25× the median, sandwiched between 9,504 the day before and 568 the day after. The second burst is 12–15 Sep 2025: 27,156 / 21,068 / 13,592 over four days, 61,816 RENDER, more than half the record month. Beyond those: 10 Apr 2026 19,590; 8 Aug 2024 19,555; 24 Oct 2024 18,825. Each such peak is most likely one large customer settling a render batch — the ledger sees the burn, not the customer.

Operator emissions are a single mint around the 23rd of each month, round to the token: 760,567 RENDER a month from February to December 2024 (only 91,268 in March–April 2024), 223,697 in January 2025, then 492,132 a month from February 2025 to date — 5.91M a year. The schedule drifts: April and June 2026 had no mint, May and July had two (984,264) — same total, shifted days. A few small mints of 50–90K (385,003 RENDER in total since 2024) are recorded in the Mint column without an identified purpose.

Total minted since moving to Solana: 2024 7.79M; 2025 5.93M; 2026 to 31 Aug 4.03M — 17.94M RENDER. The mint-to-burn ratio narrows each year: 2024 25:1, 2025 7.6:1, 2026 6.0:1; trailing 12 months 6.19M minted versus 1.03M burned. With minting fixed, the ratio closes only if burning grows — and it is growing ~26% a year, which at that rate would balance BME in roughly eight more years; the ledger states the arithmetic, not a forecast.

Today's break-even: burn 492,132 a month, ~16,200 RENDER a day — 5.9× the August 2026 pace and a third of the record day, every day. At the early-September-2026 price of $1.43 that is ~$23K of GPU rental revenue a day, or $8.5M a year.

CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap list total supply as 533,532,275 — the totalSupply of the old RNDR ERC-20 contract on Ethereum. But 450,292,838 of those sit in Wormhole's TokenBridge contract (0x3ee18B22…, contract name verified on Etherscan) — they have been swapped into RENDER on Solana and cannot circulate in both places. True supply = 484,776,832 on Solana + 83,239,437 ERC-20 not yet bridged = 568,016,268 RENDER, 6.5% above the aggregator figure. This ledger reads all three directly from RPC on every run.

Circulating supply per CoinGecko is 518.77M; max supply 644,245,094 — the cap set when the community approved BME (RNP-001), 76.2M above true supply, the remaining emission headroom for operators (~13 years at 5.91M a year with no burn offset). This ledger has no unlock schedule for RENDER — the Unlocks column is empty for lack of a source.

ATH $13.53 on 17 Mar 2024 — two months after BME began, mid AI-token frenzy, when monthly burn was just 10,184; ATL $0.037 on 16 Jun 2020. From that peak to early September 2026 the price fell 89% while monthly burn rose 8–11×: the token got cheaper precisely as the network got busier.

One consequence of BME worth recording: jobs are priced in USD, so an 89% fall in RENDER's price makes the RENDER burned for the same work nearly 9× larger. Part of the rising 2024–2026 burn line is the token price falling, not only GPU demand rising; the ledger cannot separate the two without a USD revenue source for the network.

Daily source: a Dune query over Solana token transfers (mint rndrizKT3…), counting burn and mint instructions per UTC day. The query filters out instructions ≥500,000 RENDER: unfiltered, "lifetime burn" comes to 122.5M, of which 82.7M falls on exactly four instructions on 26 Jul 2024 — the RNDR → RENDER migration through the Wormhole bridge, not GPU rent. After filtering, the largest remaining single burn is ~47K, plausible for one large render settlement.

State: Solana supply from getTokenSupply, ERC-20 supply and the Wormhole-locked balance from eth_call; "burned" is the daily series summed. USD in the state card = quantity × price at the time the page was last updated. There is no revenue, buyback or unlock column; 23 days without Dune data (2023–2024) are left blank, not interpolated.