Over $3 billion of Ethereum lost forever
Major incidents, including wallet vulnerabilities and contract faults, have led to irreversible losses of millions of ETH, amounting to over 0.76% of the total supply.
Over 913,000 ETH, worth around $3.43 billion, has been lost permanently due to user errors and contract flaws, according to Coinbase director Conor Grogan. The losses represent over 0.76% of Ethereum’s circulating supply and show the risks of human error in decentralised systems.
Among the largest losses cited are 306,000 ETH lost by the Web3 Foundation through a Parity multisig wallet vulnerability and 60,000 ETH locked in a smart contract by the now-defunct QuadrigaCX exchange.
An additional 11,500 ETH was destroyed by NFT project Akutars during a failed minting process.
Grogan also noted that more than 25,000 ETH has been sent to burn addresses directly by users.
He stressed that the $3.4 billion figure is a conservative estimate, excluding ETH lost due to forgotten private keys or dormant wallets. He noted Ethereum’s EIP-1559 burn has destroyed 5.3 million ETH, worth over $23 billion, removing more than 5% of all ETH from circulation.
These figures reveal a growing issue within the Ethereum ecosystem, where both technical flaws and irreversible design features have led to a significant amount of permanently inaccessible capital.
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