Major Ethereum Network Upgrade Went live on August 4

Ethereum’s much-hyped as well as somewhat controversial major network upgrade went live on Wednesday, ushering in the EIP-159 upgrade that adjusted gas fees. Part of that adjustment introduced a mechanism that destroys some of the base fee collected. Thanks to the upgrade, Ethereum’s protocol will algorithmically decide the transaction fee according to overall demand on the Ethereum network.

The latest update affected the price of Ether (ETH), the native token of Ethereum’s blockchain. Ether is the second-largest cryptocurrency in the world after Bitcoin. So it is not surprising that people are monitoring any information about Ethereum.

It was not easy for Ethereum users to deal with challenges. The blockchain has long-standing issues with scaling, and its unpredictable, as well as sometimes, inflated transaction fees can annoy even its biggest supporters.

The situation got even worse in recent months due to a surge in interest in nonfungible tokens. Most of them are built on Ethereum’s blockchain. The Purpose of the latest major Ethereum network upgrade is to fix many of these issues by destroying or “burning” other coins and changing the way transaction fees work so that they are more predictable.

Ethereum and main findings

The total amount of Ether, the native cryptocurrency of Ethereum burnt since the upgrade went live around 14 hours ago is roughly 3,395 ETH. Importantly, Etherchain reports an average burn rate of 2.36 ETH per minute. As a reminder, this equates to $6,596 per minute, or around $395,000. Let’s have a look at the information provided by an alternative counter called Ultrasound.money. An alternative counter reports a total burn of 3,390 ETH worth a whopping $9.5 million at the current price.

Interestingly, the popular NFT marketplace OpenSea is the main ETH burner with 374 ETH, or just over $1 million. OpenSea burned more than $1 million worth of ETH since the upgrade went live.

The second place belongs to Uniswap’s version 2 which burned 263 ETH or $740,000. Hayden Adams who founded Uniswap made a comment regarding the situation. According to Adams, if things continue at the same rate, the protocol could burn as much as 350,000 ETH.