Ethereum
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What happened? Coinbase CEO Conor Grogan has identified 636,000 permanently lost Ethereum coins worth about $1.15 billion, about 0.5% of the entire circulating supply of the asset. According to his research, published on March 21, ETH was lost due to “thousands of typos, user errors, and smart contract bugs.”
Source: twitter.com
The largest cases of loss of ETH. In 2017, 306,000 coins ($552.3 million) were lost due to an error in the smart contract of a multisig wallet from Parity Technologies. 60,000 ETH (108.3 million) in 2020 was also lost by the Quadriga crypto exchange due to a failure in the smart contract, and about 24,000 ETH (43.32 million) for the entire time was sent to the burning address by Ethereum users. Another 11,500 ETH (20.76 million) was lost as a result of the Akutars non-fungible token (NFT) collection failure in 2022.
Burning is the process of withdrawing a certain amount of tokens from circulation, after which they become permanently inaccessible. It is often carried out in order to increase the rate of an asset or prevent its inflation. Destruction can be carried out by sending tokens to a wallet without a private key, performing a hard fork, using special software, or, as in the case of Ethereum after switching to PoS, using algorithms that destroy part of the transaction fees.
Grogan stressed that his figure is significantly lower than the actual amount of lost and unavailable ETH, and he only includes cases where the coins are permanently locked. In particular, this amount does not include ETH, access to which is impossible due to the loss of private keys from crypto wallets.
As of March 21, 17:30 Moscow time, ETH is trading at $1,805, adding 1.91% in a day and 3.56% in a week, according to the Binance exchange.
Earlier, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin emphasized the importance of self-storage of cryptocurrencies and named ways to restore access to the wallet in case of loss of keys.
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