Ethereum’s supply is firmly on the decline amid a significant rise in network activity.
The second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap has been a deflationary asset since mid-January, thanks to a recent upgrade known as EIP-1559.
Since the upgrade, each time an ETH transaction is sent, a percentage of the transaction fees is permanently removed from Ethereum’s circulating supply.
This means the more interest, adoption and trading volume the Ethereum network sees, the more scarce the asset can become.
The result so far this year, as tracked by Ultrasound.Money, is that the overall supply of ETH is now in reverse.
In total, 28,730 ETH worth $48,885,818 has burned since the merge, which was 157 days ago.
Another significant Ethereum upgrade, dubbed the Shanghai upgrade, is now on the horizon.
The upgrade is expected to happen next month, and will release $25 billion worth of ETH that has been locked in early staking contracts.
After that, Ethereum developers will focus on new features such as sharding and zero-knowledge proofs.
Sharding will in essence allow the network to perform parallel processing, greatly enhancing the blockchain’s scalability.
Zero-knowledge proofs are designed to enable enhanced privacy by allowing users to authorize transactions without revealing any identifiable information.
