Ethereum records negative daily issuance for first time after EIP-1559

The daily issuance of the world's second largest cryptocurrency has gone negative for the first time since the Ethereum network's EIP-1559 upgrade.

The Block's Data Dashboard shows that the daily net emission of ether (ETH) on September 3 was -333, which became negative about 30 days after the EIP-1559 upgrade was activated on August 5.

The upgrade changes Ethereum's monetary policy by burning part of the transaction fees in every new block that previously belonged to Ethereum miners in an effort to alleviate the fees for network users.

Since the code activation, about 193,000 ETH have been burnt as of press time, worth more than $700 million at ETH's current price.

The Block's Dashboard further shows the amount of ETH burnt on September 3 was 13,840, surpassing the 13.507 ETH that were newly minted as block subsidies over the same period.

Since August 5, the daily issuance of ETH has been on a deflationary trend. While Ethereum's mining revenue managed to hold up in August by dollar terms, it was mainly due to ETH's price rally and the surge of on-chain activities relating to the NFT markets. 

In fact, the transaction fees that Ethereum miners collected in August went down from over 90,000 ETH in July to just above 66,159 ETH while more than 170,000 ETH were burnt last month.

About 15% of the burnt ETH for August were transaction fees associated with on-chain activities on the NFT marketplace Opensea, public data shows.

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About Author

Wolfie joined The Block’s news team in 2020 and switched to the research side in 2021 to focus on crypto mining analysis. Prior to The Block, he had been a journalist at CoinDesk for three years. Wolfie has a background in financial journalism.