The second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, has officially destroyed more than 2 million ETH via the burn mechanism introduced last year
Data from Watch the Burn shows that over 2 million ETH — worth about $5.7 billion — has been burned since Ethereum implemented EIP-1559. The latter is a real-time burn mechanism that arrived with the London hard fork in August 2021.
The Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 created a new system under which transaction fees that were formerly all paid to miners were split into a base fee and a tip to the miner. Now the miner gets the tip, but the base fee is burned, or destroyed.
The new system prevents miners from being able to “game the system” with spam transactions, according to Tim Beiko, an Ethereum developer. Those spam transactions can raise the minimum fee for everyone else.
Vitalik talks about Danksharding in EIP-4844
Danksharding will introduce the “merged fee market,” where one proposer chooses all transactions and all data fits into that slot. This is as opposed to a fixed number of shards that each have distinct blocks and block proposers.
Buterin talks about many other technical aspects of Danksharding, so it’s worth reading in full. The change is yet another in what is turning out to be a monumental year for Ethereum. Sharding will bring tremendous changes to the network and should make it even more of the haven of DeFi that it already is.