While waiting for users to decide to make withdrawals, the total value of ether fell below the billion dollar mark. Indeed, the leading smart contract protocol is burning through its reserves at an increasingly rapid rate.
According to data tracking website Token Unlocks, 488,470 Ether tokens are pending withdrawal. At current prices, these tokens are worth less than $900 million, significantly less than the more than $3 billion pending withdrawal recorded in mid-April. This therefore proves that ETH withdrawals have slowed down in recent days.
Even though it is expected that in the next 22 hours approximately $7 million worth of ether will be withdrawn, this progression remains slow compared to that observed last month.
On April 12, shortly before 6:30 p.m. EST, the Shapella update on Ethereum was performed. This led to the possibility of making staked ether withdrawals. This is the first major update since last year’s transition of the protocol to proof-of-stake achieved through The Merge.
Ethereum net staking balance rebalancing
Ethereum net balance based on staking which is the ratio between the total amount of ether removed and the amount deposited, is slowly approaching parity. However, this balance is gradually beginning to rebalance itself.
Indeed, net staking increased yesterday by around 20,960 tokens. Since the shanghai updateso the net staking balance is less than 344,470 tokens, or less than $671.23 million.
According to data from Token Unlocksthe amount of deposited ether is estimated at 17.74 million, which represents a value of more than 32.5 billion dollars.
Meme Tokens Promote Rise in Ether Burning
Ethereum withdrawals decreased due to the increase in the percentage of total supply staked. Nevertheless, throughout the last few weeks, network activity has contributed to the increase in the rate of use of funds.
Over the past 30 days, Ether supply has shrunk by 0.611% per year. According to the offer tracking site Ultra Sound Moneythis rate is significantly higher than that recorded after The Merge update, which was 0.179% per year.
Thus, during the past week, the rate of burning has accelerated further, to reach 0.884% per year. In other words, over 20,400 ethers have been burned in the last seven days, which is an amount of almost $37.9 million.
The main reason for these above normal burns has to do with traders using decentralized platforms for trading meme tokens, such as $PEPE or even $WOJACK.
In this regard, Steven Zheng, research director of The Blocksaid :
“Over the past week, Uniswap has remained the biggest ETH burner due to its increased usage by meme token traders.”