Ethereum’s total supply has peaked at 120,521,139.31 at 6:43AM UTC earlier today and it may well be the network will never reach that level again.
That’s because ethereum has become deflationary, at least for the day, with 177 eth removed from total circulation, worth $260,000.
Ethereum’s supply is now 120,520,966 eth in the first development of its kind in the crypto space since bitcoin was invented.
Circulating supply is even lower because the stakers can not move neither the amount they stake or the rewards they receive until the Unlock upgrade sometime in six months.
But total supply is also falling, in a very new development that ushers in an era of deflation for eth.
Ethereum will become rarer, and will keep being rarer still, as the currency finalizes its monetary policy, with no change possible any more.
The money ‘algo’ has been frozen, and any equivalent of Jerome Powell that there may have been in eth in the past seven years, has been fired.
Because ethereum has now reached the right balance in providing stakers with rewards to secure the network, while burning some of the fees to not dilute the holders.
Overall that translates to a bit of eth being taken out of circulation more than is given in rewards, and depending on usage it can be a lot of eth or less than is given in rewards.
The network currently is running at a bigger speed than during the lull prior to the merge, burning 130.63 eth in the past hour.
That has an issuance offset of 0.21x, but even at the usual 1,570.40 eth burned a day we have seen for the past weeks, issuance is offset, reduced, by 0.1x.
That’s according to the algorithmically calculated data by Ultrasound Money. Usually we round it up to 2,000 eth in rewards, but that depends on many factors of course in regards to how many are staking and the precise level of reward.
So, a bit surprisingly to us, the precise data shows that ethereum is deflationary at even these very low levels of network usage, the lowest in two years or more.
Due to numerous scaling technologies, set to go out and be refined in the next two years, ethereum’s capacity will increase, and so too will its network usage.
Fees can lower as well, of course, but there’s a very good chance that ethereum’s peak of supply has been reached today.
That makes this day historic, in monetary finance too, potentially. And it’s September 15th, so both the day and the month are worthy of unnoticed history.
That’s because there’s never been a money, used widely as eth is in defi, NFTs and much else with its market cap higher than the M0 national fiat supply of many countries, where a precise supply can be calculated and the supply is deflationary.
Bitcoin is set to reach the same milestone maybe in a decade when despite its supply being fixed, dust or coins lost can still translate to it being deflationary.
For ethereum, however, it is not practically deflationary, but numerically deflationary, and there can be sufficient – though tentative – confidence at this point that this will never change because there is no foreseeable good reason for it to change.
It has taken seven years to get to here, and numerous Powell like committees, with all the politicking that naturally attracts.
That’s all over now. For, at least in this parameter, code has replaced man.
