Token Burn Rate

Burning removes tokens from supply permanently, either by sending them to an address with no private key or by a protocol rule that deletes them. Named mechanisms include the EIP-1559 base fee on Ethereum, which destroys the base portion of every transaction fee; buyback-and-burn programs run by exchange-token issuers using company revenue; and transfer taxes that burn a fixed share of each transfer. This metric averages destruction over a trailing window to give a daily token count.

How it is computed

tokens destroyed over the last 30 days / 30

Where it misleads

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 policy rather than protocol rules and can be reduced or suspended without warning; in several cases the tokens burned were held by the issuer and never circulated, so the burn removed nothing from the tradable supply. Tokens sent to a burn address are treated as destroyed by some providers and as circulating by others, since the chain itself cannot confirm that no key exists. A burn expressed in tokens looks constant while its economic weight moves with price.

The equity comparison, and why it fails

Share buyback and cancellation. The analogy fails because a buyback is funded from audited corporate cash and reduces a count recorded in a legal register, while a protocol burn may be funded by the transaction fees of unrelated users and confers no claim, no vote, and no cash to anyone.

Reading a high or a low value

A higher daily figure means more tokens are being permanently removed from supply; a lower one means fewer. Whether this changes total supply direction depends on the issuance running alongside it, which the net issuance metric captures.