Ethereum destroyed 3,000 ETH in half a day, and NFT projects became the biggest burners

Note: The original text comes from bankless, and the author is William M. Peaster.

Last night, with the official completion of the Ethereum London hard fork upgrade, the effectiveness of EIP-1559 has begun to take effect.

This is a special moment for the Ethereum community. It has been two years in the making, and the activation of EIP-1559 updates Ethereum’s fee market system to make it more predictable and user-friendly.

Under this new fee system, a base portion of the fees for each Ethereum transaction is burned. Over time, this "burning" will make ETH deflationary and put upward pressure on its price, which in turn will increase the security of the Ethereum network.

As of press time, we are about 13 hours into the first EIP-1559 ETH burn, and according to data tracking site ultrasound.money, the total ETH burned on the Ethereum network has exceeded 3,200 ETH.

Since the beginning of the year, the average daily issuance of Ethereum is about 10,400 ETH. If we maintain the current daily burning rate of 6,000 ETH, Ethereum’s production will be reduced by nearly 60%.

This data is indeed impressive, and it will be very interesting to see which projects become the biggest “ETH burners” in the early stages.

As you can see in the picture above, 2 of the top 5 "ETH burners" so far are clearly NFT projects, one is OpenSea, the largest NFT trading market at present (358 ETH has been destroyed so far), and the other is the recently popular NFT game Axie Infinity (141 ETH has been destroyed so far).

Both projects are currently seeing incredible levels of activity, which comes as no surprise to NFT observers, as OpenSea is currently one of the highest-grossing online marketplaces in the world, and Axie Infinity currently has 1 million daily active users.

(Translator's note: By checking etherscan, we found that the address that currently burns the most ETH is also an NFT project, but it seems to be just a copy of CryptoPunk.)

From here, then, some early points to consider include:

1. The arrival of EIP-1559 further strengthens the symbiotic relationship between Ethereum and NFTs - Ethereum provides a programmable environment and essentially permanent infrastructure for NFTs, while NFTs now serve Ethereum’s security more directly.

2. As the top NFT projects continue to grow and more NFT projects arrive, it will be interesting to see how the ETH burn rankings change.

3. The fact that the Ethereum community could collectively accomplish an upgrade of this scale and importance shows that Ethereum and its NFT ecosystem are poised to continue to thrive.