Burn assets | Immutable Documentation (2024)

Burning is the process of permanently removing tokens from circulation. On Ethereum mainnet, this is achieved by transferring the asset to a designated burn address (a "zero account"). A burn address is not owned by any user and no one can feasibly guess its private key, so any assets owned by a burn address are considered lost forever.

On Immutable X L2, the designated burn address comprises of a L1 burn account (zero address - 0x00...0) paired with a non-zero Stark key (0x00...01). The Stark key must be non-zero because a zero Stark key does not lie on the Stark elliptic curve and would therefore be invalid, so the next closest was chosen. For the L1 zero account, finding the Stark private key for this public key is practically impossible, so assets owned by this Stark key will remain locked in the Stark smart contract forever and cannot be transferred or withdrawn.

Burn addresses:​

BurnEthAddress = 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
BurnStarkKey = 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

How to burn an asset​

To burn an asset, you simply need to transfer the asset to the burn address:

• SDKs or API: Use the transfer function and set the burn address as the recipient.
• JS SDK: There is a burn function which is just a wrapper around the standard transfer function to a burn address.

import { ImmutableXClient } from '@imtbl/imx-sdk';

client = ImmutableXClient.build({...})

await client.burn({
 sender: "<wallet-address>",
 token: {
 type: ERC721TokenType.ERC721,
 data:{
 tokenId: "123",
 tokenAddress: "0xacb3c6a43d15b907e8433077b6d38ae40936fe2c"
 }
 },
 quantity: 1,
});

await client.transfer({
 sender: '<wallet-address>',
 token: {
 type: ERC721TokenType.ERC721,
 data: {
 tokenId: '123',
 tokenAddress: '0xacb3c6a43d15b907e8433077b6d38ae40936fe2c',
 },
 },
 receiver: '0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000',
 quantity: 1,
});

Get burned assets​

Burned assets will still show up in the listAssets API endpoint with a "burned" status. This is a filterable field.

This is an example of getting burned assets using the JS SDK:

import { ImmutableXClient, ImmutableAssetStatus } from '@imtbl/imx-sdk';
client = ImmutableXClient.build({...})

const burnedAssets = await client.getAssets({
 status: ImmutableAssetStatus.burned, // 'burned'
});

Multi-burns​

This allows you to burn multiple assets with one function call, however, keep in mind that under the hood, this submits separate transfer transactions to the API. Although rare, it is possible to have some transfers fail while others succeed, so multi-burns (just like multi-transfers) are not an entirely atomic operation. We will be looking into adding support for atomic 'multi' transactions across all features in the future.

For use cases such as "burn x NFTs to receive a new NFT", it is currently recommended to keep track of all successful and failed burns (provided in the Link.transfer response), and implement a retry mechanism for users to complete their full burn before triggering the next step in the process.