Token Burn
Permanently destroying units of an asset, either by deleting them in the contract or by sending them where nobody can spend them.
Three mechanisms are common. A contract can expose a burn function that reduces total supply directly. Units can be sent to an address with no known private key, which leaves them visible forever but unspendable. A protocol can burn at the base layer, as Ethereum does by destroying the base fee of every transaction under EIP-1559, so usage itself removes supply. Burns are verifiable on-chain, which distinguishes them from most corporate announcements, but the source matters: destroying tokens from a treasury the issuer controls removes units that were never available to anyone else.
In practice
Under EIP-1559 the base fee paid on an Ethereum transaction is destroyed rather than paid to a validator, so ordinary network usage reduces supply.
The common misunderstanding
Burning tokens does not create value by itself; it changes the number of units, and any effect on price depends on demand, which a burn does not change.
The figure this maps to
How many tokens are permanently destroyed each day by the protocol's burn mechanisms.
Limits: Burns tied to network congestion, such as the EIP-1559 base fee, scale directly with demand for blockspace, so a quiet month understates the mechanism's capacity and a mint frenzy overstates it, and neither extrapolates to a year. Discretionary buyback-and-burn programs are corporate or governance…