Last November, we reported on the number of ETH burned since the implementation of EIP-1559. In the space of three or four months, more than 1 million Ethers had been taken out of the network. Today, we have doubled the number of units destroyed over the same period of time, i.e. a little more than 6 billion dollars gone up in smoke!
To the pyre of the ETH!
As a reminder, the EIP-1559 was an update of the Ethereum network which deeply modified the system of rewards granted to validators. Indeed, when the blockchain was saturated, especially because of the craze of cryptophiles for NFT, the fees literally exploded! The users of the network were then ready to pay more and more for their transactions, so that they could be integrated in a block and be validated. Naturally, the validators rubbed their hands, since they were encouraged to favor transactions paying the most fees. But the EIP-1559 came to update this system, which strongly displeased the validators.
In any case, this update was made through the Hard Fork London and in the space of a few months, 1 million Ethers went up in smoke! The deflationary process of Ethereum was set in motion.
The website watchtheburn allows you to follow the burning of ETH live
Screenshot of the WatchtheBurn website
Since then, water has flowed under the bridge and calmed the fire. We have even seen a drop in transaction fees on the Ethereum blockchain.
Sometimes the best solution is to leave no choice
Meanwhile, a turf war was raging within the Ethereum community, as validators began to pressure developers in an effort to delay the move to Proof-of-Stake. But that was without counting on the genius straight out of the brain of Vitalik Buterin. Indeed, although the Ethereum blockchain has always been intended to move to Proof-of-Stake, this process takes time. So much so that we are not even talking about Ethereum 2.0 anymore, but about The Merge update.
This update will aim to anticipate the transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake consensus mode. This transition has already been implemented on the Klin tesnet and aims to connect the execution layer of the Ethereum blockchain to the Proof-of-Stake consensus layer provided by the Beacon Chain.
Recently, Vitalik Buterin published a tweet in which he speaks about sharding, which will be the last step in the evolution of the Ethereum network. It’s not sharding per se yet, but Vitalik does shed some light on the concept of Danksharding and Proto-Danksharding.
Roughly speaking, Danksharding will introduce a “merged fee market” where a proposer chooses all transactions and data and then puts them into a block. As opposed to the current form where a fixed number of fragments each have separate blocks and also separate block proposers. The Merge update is still scheduled for June. This will mark a milestone in the life cycle of Ethereum, which we hope will go well. If you want to go into more detail on the subject, we advise you to follow this link.
In view of the amount of transaction fees that are currently tending to decrease and the number of ETH burned. We can see that the craze does not stop around the Ethereum blockchain. If The Merge update goes smoothly and sharding is implemented, we can imagine an undivided reign of Ethereum on the DeFi.
