According to the ‘burn leaderboard’ published by Ultrasound Money, OpenSea rank as the greatest source of Ethereum burnt since the EIP-1559 London hard fork.
The burn leaderboard lists OpenSea in the number one spot, having burned a total of 28,238.26 ETH since EIP-1559 at the time of writing. Second place goes to all ETH transfers that have been processed on the Ethereum network, which totals 15,205.90 ETH — 46.15% less than that of OpenSea.
When you add in the amount of ETH burned by the registry of OpenSea, which is listed separately at number nine (2,561.67 ETH), this means that OpenSea has burned a total of 30,799.93 ETH, more than double that of all standard Ethereum transfers combined.
London’s burning
EIP-1559, also known as the ‘London’ hard fork, is an upgrade to the Ethereum network which launched on Aug 5, 2021. London introduces several new features such as a means of tackling the significant scalability issues which have plagued the network exponentially as utilization increases. Specifically the volatility and inflation of network transaction fees faced by users and developers.
London attempts to make these fees deflationary, reducing transaction fees and validator rewards by burning between 25% and 75% previously offered to miners from the base fee associated with each transaction made on the network. This new fee-burning process takes place on a daily basis.
When BeInCrypto last reported on this burning process, the total number of Ethereum burned since the upgrade was 73,569 ETH. As of writing, the total number of burned ETH has risen to 178,808, making the average number of ETH burned approximately 58,924 per day.
This comes as part of a larger push from the Ethereum team towards the adoption of ETH 2.0, which ditches the Proof-of-Work (PoW) model by implementing an alternative consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Stake (PoS). PoS mitigates transaction fee volatility and scalability issues completely by replacing the demanding, resource-heavy ‘mining’ validator process with a more democratic form of network governance. This process rewards randomly selected quorums of validators based on their volume of staked tokens on the network.
NFT craze tops the Ethereum charts
Other top burners include Uniswap V2 which has burned a total of 11,011.20 ETH to date, along with Tether, Axie Infinity, Uniswap V3, and Metamask.
This is not surprising considering the sheer dominance of the ongoing non-fungible token (NFT) craze. As a marketplace for the trading of NFTs, this is a craze that OpenSea is a key player and proponent of.
In fact, even BeInCrypto (BIC) is currently using OpenSea to host its anniversary charity NFT auction. The limited four-day BIC Charity NFT Auction is raising money through the auction of unique digital artwork for the Open Earth Foundation (OEF), a non-profit which promotes “open digital infrastructure” for Earth system management.
Disclaimer
In adherence to the Trust Project guidelines, BeInCrypto is committed to unbiased, transparent reporting. This news article aims to provide accurate, timely information. However, readers are advised to verify facts independently and consult with a professional before making any decisions based on this content. Please note that our Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy, and Disclaimers have been updated.
