By March 2022, over 119 million Ethereum tokens were issued and in active circulation - but it is expected new coins will not arrive at a fast pace. Although the cryptocurrency has an unlimited supply - unlike Bitcoin, of which there can only be 21 million tokens and not a single more - the Ethereum blockchain received an update in August 2021, EIP-1559, that both increased the block size needed to create new coins and destroyed (“burned”) any transactions fees, rather than send them to the original miners. This led to a decline in issuance, as mining Ethereum essentially was made less profitable. Issuance is expected to decline further when Ethereum 2.0 arrives.
Ethereum: a counter to inflation?
In a time when inflation rates became a big talking point, Ethereum received much social media attention in late 2021 for possibly being deflationary. This argument stems from August 2021, or “London Hard Fork”, upgrade in August 2021: Each transaction on the Ethereum network would entirely remove a portion of Ethereum from the total supply in circulation. On days of high transaction activity of Ethereum, for example, after a change in the price of Ethereum, this can effectively mean more coins are being destroyed than there are being created.
Ethereum supply to change after the upgrade to 2.0?
Experts state burning on a scale that the supply of Ethereum declines only happens on occasion, stating it acts more as a temporary slowdown of growth rather than an active attempt to continuously shrink supply. This could change, however, when Ethereum 2.0 arrives – or when Ethereum switches from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). The general assumption for this is that staking rewards are generally lower than rewards for Proof-of-Work (mining), lowering the incentive for the creation of new coins. If usage – which some measure via the Ethereum gas price, or transaction fee per transaction – remains unchanged otherwise, this would lower the threshold for Ethereum to become deflationary.
