by Lydia Ludmila 
Ethereum recently implemented its London upgrade, which was one of the most anticipated improvements to its network. The reason for this is that the upgrade brought quite a few changes, but the biggest one is how it handles transaction fees.
The newly introduced mechanism adjusts gas fees by burning some of the base fees collected. Due to high activity within the ETH network and hype about the upgrade, Ethereum (ETH/USD) has been burning around 2.3 ETH per minute, which is an equivalent of $6,600. In other words, the network is burning almost $400,000 worth of ETH every single hour following the hard fork.
In the first two hours after the launch of EIP 1559, the project has burned around 80 ETH. After 14 hours, the total amount burned was almost 3,400 ETH. According to calculations, Uniswap alone will end up burning around 350,000 Ethereum (almost $1 billion) every year. However, the biggest ETH burner by far is the leading NFT marketplace, OpenSea.
According to burn trackers, OpenSea burned around $1 million, which is equal to 374 ETH. Uniswap’s Version 2 is in second place, as mentioned, with 263 ETH burned in a little over 12 hours.
Researchers are already making predictions
All in all, the implementation of the London upgrade is a big win for Ethereum, and now, everyone is waiting to see what consequences will the new mechanism have for the network. The Bankless DeFi sent a newsletter with its own calculations and figures regarding what will happen next. Of course, making such predictions is rather difficult, since the base fee is between 25% and 75% of the total transaction fee.
Even so, by analyzing the available figures, researchers concluded that anywhere between 800,000 ETH and 2.4 million ETH will be burned by the end of the year. Combined with the expecting reduction in block reward issuance due to the merge to PoS, Ethereum could easily end up having a deflationary supply.
