At least 913,111 Ether (ETH) have been permanently lost, according to an analysis posted on X by Conor Grogan, Head of Product at Coinbase.
At current market prices, that’s over $3.43 billion in value that is simply gone, trapped, or inaccessible. It represents more than 0.76% of the total circulating supply of the Ethereum blockchain's native token. However, when including the estimated 6.5 million ETH burned with EIP-1559, the total increases to over 5% of all ETH ever minted that have been permanently destroyed.
Source: Conor Grogan/X
In his thread, Grogan also went through the largest sources of the lost ETH. The standout losses, according to him are:
- The Web3 foundation has 306,000 ETH trapped due to a vulnerability in the Parity Multisig wallet.
- Former crypto exchange Quadriga lost 60,000 ETH to a flawed contract
- NFT project Akutars lost 11,500 ETH with a faulty NFT-minting process
- Furthermore, users have collectively sent 24,000 ETH to burn addresses, which removes that currency from circulation.
He added that his estimate “significantly undershoots the actual lost/inaccessible ETH amount – it just covers instances where Ethereum is locked forever.”
While Ether does not have a strict supply cap, there are specific technological constraints that effectively limit the amount of the coin.
There are currently 120.7M ETH in circulation.
