About $2 billion worth of Ethereum from 603,452 ETH has already been burned by the grid, fueling the furnace that brought the cryptocurrency to its latest all-time record.

More than $2 billion in Ethereum have been burned since August

The network started burning ETH units after the introduction of the EIP-1559 protocol, effective on August 5th of this year.

The system removes about $30 million of ETH from circulation each day and sends it to a dead wallet address. This replaces the previous method of paying miners cryptocurrencies to validate transactions.

The EIP-1559 is designed to accelerate a long-awaited update called Ethereum 2.0. The update verifies Ethereum transactions as Proof of Stake, an energy efficiency algorithm that replaces the Proof of Work engine, which is considered cumbersome for computer systems.

Read more:

• China is thinking about unbanning bitcoin mining after price rise and started a new research
• Cryptocurrencies may reduce US sanctions effectiveness, says US government report
• Bitcoin miners’ exit from China start to disrupt Russia energy supply

Although Ethereum and Ethereum 2.0 are expected to merge with the Proof of Stake in early 2022, it will still be a few years before Ethereum 2.0 has the same smart contracting capabilities that the mainstream network has hitherto possessed.

One of the criticisms of deploying EIP-1559 was that it would lower Gas fees — it still costs about $38 to exchange a token on the Uniswap decentralized exchange, for example, and several hundred dollars to mint an NFT. Instead, the EIP-1559 is designed to make Ethereum transaction fees more predictable.

Another much commented criticism surrounding the network change was the discontent of the Ethereum mining community. That’s because the investment to compete in mining is heavy and requires specific graphics cards, scarce and expensive devices.

However, by decreasing the supply of Ethereum, the EIP-1559 helped raise the price of the cryptocurrency. This week, the asset reached $4,366, an all-time record. But Ethereum’s rise to the top came in the wake of a new Bitcoin futures ETF, which the SEC suddenly approved last week.

With informations: Decrypt