Ethereum’s Supply Falls by ◊70,000 – Trustnodes

Ethereum’s total supply has fallen by nearly 67,000 eth, worth $122 million, for the first time since the currency launched in 2015.

Eth went deflationary on January 16th, and since then its total supply has fallen by between 1,000 eth to 2,000 a day depending on network usage.

It is currently burning more than 2,100 eth a day, but about 2,000 eth are issued to stakers, so making the fall in supply circa ◊100 as it has slowed down recently to usually hundreds of eth instead of more than a thousand as was the case for much of last month.

But the top burners leaderboard has become a lot more colorful with two very interesting new entrants that may well transform ethereum.

Arbitrum, one of the first second layer based on optimistic rollups to launch on eth – optimistic because they assume off-chain transactions are valid according to Corwin Smith of the Ethereum Foundation – is airdropping the Arb token this week to some 600,000 addresses.

They left out about 70% of their users, or two million addresses, but nonetheless this is one of the big happening in eth that will keep plenty occupied for some time.

zkSync, the zk-tech based second layer, has also made the leaderboard in part because they have not yet launched an airdrop and everyone expects them to do so at some point.

How these airdrops are distributed may well be a key part of just how the market values and sees these projects, after the tech itself of course.

But zkSync seems to be moving. They opened their mainnet to devs last month in anticipation of a full zkEVM launch later this year, while Polygon claims theirs will be out in basically days, next week.

The entrance of these two in the burn leaderboard suggests some things are changing in eth almost precisely four years since plans were publicized for these projects.

That might indicate the full bull, when it comes and if some might say, will have a far bigger arena to play as ethereum’s total capacity might go exponential, at least for some time.

That’s especially because these second layers are finding usage, and although they are pretty much at the edges of the frontier with its own risks and wilderness, that people are using them is a revelation as that was not quite known especially in light of the experience of bitcoin’s Lightning Network.

The burn therefore may well be a very secondary story to just who is burning, and since the muses have stricken us, we’d say an Indian rain dance gathering is burning some wood fire somewhere to call the dawn of the so-long coming broadband age after more than a decade of dial up in crypto.