The current positive inflation rate shows that the volume of Ether being minted now outpaces the amount that is being burned. Ether’s net issuance, the annualized inflation rate, has increased to 0.07%. It had dropped below zero amid market volatility brought in by FTX’s collapse.
But a rise in the Ethereum network usage led to millions of dollars in crypto moving on-chain. Supply, as per ultrasound money, increased 0.14% at an annual rate over the past seven days. Nick Hotz, the vice president of research at Arca, related Ether’s deflationary flip to a lack of network activity leading to reduced demand. He explained that post-FTX, there was a huge demand to swap on both centralized and decentralized exchanges because of volatility. But now, that has decreased and there is very little demand to use either centralized or decentralized exchanges.
Market watchers had expected Ethereum’s Merge to turn Ether deflationary. The shift from proof-of-work (PoW) protocol to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus eliminated mining and staking rewards totaling about 1,600 ETH per day. This was a 90% drop in new issuance. It should be noted that Ethereum’s inflation rate also depends on the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)-1559. On this mechanism, fees are paid for transactions on the network that are burned or removed from circulation. The EIP-1559 is tied to the amount of Ether burned with network usage. The more the transactions, the more ETH was burned.
The amount of ETH burnt, as per data from Etherscan, spiked as much as 5,000 ETH in a day following FTX’s implosion. But now, the burn rate has slowed to around 1,200 ETH daily.
