Why ETH stopped being deflationary: the base fee fell
The burn is the base fee times the gas used, so it depends on demand for block space on Ethereum’s main chain. The average base fee has fallen by more than 99% since 2021. Dencun (March 13, 2024) gave rollups a separate, cheaper place to post data, blobs (EIP-4844), whose fees are also burned but have stayed tiny: about 4,700 ETH in total since March 2024. Block capacity has grown too: the blocks we sampled on October 18, 2026 had a 60 million gas limit and used about half of it.
| Year | Average base fee | Median day | Supply growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 (from Aug 5) | 89.9 gwei | 85.7 gwei | +3.48% (incl. mining) |
| 2022 | 41.0 gwei | 25.8 gwei | +2.09% (incl. mining) |
| 2023 | 27.8 gwei | 23.6 gwei | −0.29% |
| 2024 | 16.0 gwei | 11.5 gwei | +0.24% |
| 2025 | 2.00 gwei | 0.72 gwei | +0.72% |
| 2026 (to Oct 18) | 0.27 gwei | 0.14 gwei | +0.66% |
Average of daily average base fees (ultrasound.money base-fee-over-time), not gas-weighted. The 30 days to October 18, 2026 averaged 0.37 gwei. Month-by-month gas since 2015, record days and gas limit changes are in the Ethereum gas price history. For live gas prices and the cheapest hours to transact, see the ETH gas tracker.
Cheap fees are good for users and they are the point of Ethereum’s scaling roadmap, but they also mean the burn no longer offsets issuance. Whether ETH turns deflationary again depends on demand for mainnet block space and blobs growing faster than capacity, which nobody can promise. For how rollups changed the fees people pay, see layer 2 fees compared. Supply only tells you how many ETH exist, not what each is worth to you; to see how many ETH it takes to hold $1 million at a given price, use the ETH millionaire calculator.
Calculator: at what gas price is ETH deflationary?
Change the average base fee, how much gas blocks use and how much ETH is staked, and see whether supply would grow or shrink in a year. Try the presets: at 2022’s 41 gwei average, today’s busier blocks would burn far more than is issued. Presets change only the base fee. In 2024 blocks had a 30 million gas limit, half of today’s, so the same fee burned less; that is why supply still grew in 2024 at a 16 gwei average.
- New ETH issued per year
- +1,082,495 ETH
- about 2,964 a day
- ETH burned per year
- −29,483 ETH
- about 81 a day
- Net supply change per year
- +1,053,013 ETH (+0.86% a year)
- Inflationary: more ETH would be issued than burned, so supply would grow.
At 30.3 million gas per block and 43.76 million ETH staked, ETH breaks even at an average base fee of about 13.6 gwei. Above that, supply shrinks.
Defaults are the last 30 days (to October 18, 2026): 0.37 gwei average base fee, 30.3 million gas per block (our 150-block sample) and 43.76 million ETH staked. Issuance uses the consensus-layer reward formula (about 166.3 × √staked ETH a year at full participation, scaled to 98.4% to match ultrasound.money’s measured 30-day issuance). Blob fees, priority tips and MEV are ignored: tips and MEV go to validators and are not burned. A model, not a forecast.
How ETH issuance works after the Merge
- Only validators are issued new ETH. Each epoch (6.4 minutes) pays rewards scaled by
BASE_REWARD_FACTOR(64) divided by the square root of all staked ETH. Summed over every validator, maximum issuance is about 166.3 × √(total ETH staked) a year. - With 43.76 million ETH staked that is about 1.10 million ETH a year at perfect participation; the measured 30-day rate is 1.08 million (about 98.4%), because some validators miss duties.
- Because issuance grows with the square root of stake, quadrupling the ETH staked only doubles issuance, and the yield per staker falls. ethereum.org’s example: 14 million ETH staked gave about 1,700 ETH a day.
- Tips and MEV paid to validators are not new ETH; they move existing ETH from users. Slashing and inactivity penalties destroy small amounts.
Staking yield and supply growth are two sides of the same issuance. If you stake, your share of all ETH grows by your yield minus supply growth: about 2.5% − 0.8% today. Compare staking options in the staking comparator or read what Ethereum staking is. How the staking rate itself has fallen as more ETH is staked is charted in the Ethereum staking APR history.
ETH vs bitcoin supply inflation
Bitcoin has a hard cap of 21 million coins and a schedule that halves new issuance about every four years. Its block subsidy has been 3.125 BTC since the April 2024 halving, about 164,000 BTC a year, or roughly 0.82% of the 20.1 million bitcoins in circulation (blockchain.com, October 18, 2026). ETH grew 0.82% over the same last year, so today the two are almost level. The difference is predictability: bitcoin’s rate will halve again around 2028, while ETH’s depends on how much is staked and how much is burned. Since the Merge, ETH has averaged about 0.33% a year.
Against Solana the gap is wider: SOL’s inflation rate was 3.60% a year on October 19, 2026 (Solana RPC), on a schedule that falls 15% a year toward a permanent 1.5%, and only half of each Solana base fee is burned. SeeEthereum vs Solana supply and inflation.
For the price side of the comparison, see ETH vs BTC returns by year and the Ethereum vs Bitcoin guide.
Is ETH “ultrasound money”?
“Ultrasound money” is the idea that ETH’s supply can shrink over time, making it scarcer than “sound” money with a fixed cap. The record so far is mixed. Since the Merge, supply has grown 0.33% a year on average, far below the roughly 4.6% a year Ethereum would have issued under proof of work (ethereum.org). It did shrink for about 18 months, but it has grown steadily since April 2024. A low, flexible issuance rate is a fair description today; a shrinking supply is not.
Supply is only one input to price. ETH closed at $2,399.68 on October 17, 2026, about half its record, while supply was growing; in 2023, when supply shrank, the price rose 91%. See the Ethereum price history and our balanced take on whether Ethereum is a good investment.
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Cite as: “GrowYourEthereum, Ethereum Supply Data (from ultrasound.money), CC BY 4.0, growyourethereum.com/data/ethereum-supply.”
License: Our tables, charts and CSV files are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Share and adapt them for any purpose, including commercially, with credit and a link to the license. Each CSV repeats the license and attribution in its header lines. Raw supply figures come from ultrasound.money’s public API; their terms apply to that raw feed.
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Free to reuse in articles, research, reports and apps under CC BY 4.0. Copy a ready-made citation below; the HTML version includes the credit link the license asks for.
GrowYourEthereum. (2026). Ethereum Supply Data (from ultrasound.money) [Data set]. Updated October 19, 2026. https://growyourethereum.com/data/ethereum-supply. Licensed CC BY 4.0.
<a href="https://growyourethereum.com/data/ethereum-supply">Ethereum Supply Data (from ultrasound.money)</a> by GrowYourEthereum, licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY 4.0</a>.
@misc{growyourethereum_ethereum_supply_2026,
author = {{GrowYourEthereum}},
title = {Ethereum Supply Data (from ultrasound.money)},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://growyourethereum.com/data/ethereum-supply}},
note = {Data set, updated October 19, 2026. CC BY 4.0}
}Embed it instead: Current ETH supply plus net supply change and growth rate for every year since 2015. Paste this into any page that accepts HTML. It is free, has no ads and keeps a visible credit line.
<iframe src="https://growyourethereum.com/embed/eth-supply" width="100%" height="640" style="border:none;max-width:780px;display:block;" title="Ethereum supply and inflation by year by GrowYourEthereum" loading="lazy" ></iframe> <p style="font-size:13px;">Source: <a href="https://growyourethereum.com/data/ethereum-supply">Ethereum supply: is ETH deflationary?</a> by GrowYourEthereum (CC BY 4.0). Raw supply from ultrasound.money.</p>
More datasets, JSON files and embeddable widgets: free Ethereum data for journalists, researchers and builders.
Methodology
- Supply: ultrasound.money, which sums all execution-layer balances and beacon-chain validator balances and subtracts the deposit contract’s balance. Daily values at 00:00 UTC; July 30, 2015 to June 22, 2024 from its supply-projection inputs and August 6, 2021 to October 19, 2026 from supply-over-time (the two series match exactly where they overlap through early 2023 and within 0.001% in 2024).
- Burn, issuance, staked ETH and the break-even base fee are ultrasound.money’s own figures, read on October 19, 2026 at 00:06 UTC. Base fee by year is the mean of its daily averages.
- Cross-checks: CoinGecko total supply (122,145,416 ETH, within 0.003%) and our own read of 150 recent blocks from a public Ethereum node (base fee × gas used).
- Two days are missing in the source (April 13–14, 2023 and May 12, 2024); month boundaries use the nearest earlier day. ETH sent to unspendable addresses is still counted as supply, as on most trackers.
Ethereum supply FAQ
Is ETH deflationary right now?
No. As of October 18, 2026, ETH’s supply is growing. It rose 996,104 ETH (+0.82%) over the last 365 days to 122,141,329 ETH, and the last 30 days annualize to about +0.86% a year (ultrasound.money). Validators are issued roughly 2,970 new ETH a day while only about 80 ETH a day is burned, because the average base fee has been around 0.37 gwei. Supply last fell in a calendar month in March 2024.
What is the total supply of Ethereum?
About 122.14 million ETH: 122,141,329 ETH at 00:00 UTC on October 19, 2026 (8 PM Eastern on October 18), per ultrasound.money, which adds execution-layer balances and beacon-chain balances and subtracts the ETH sitting in the deposit contract so staked ETH is not counted twice. CoinGecko showed 122,145,416 ETH a few minutes later, within 0.003%. Of that, about 43.76 million ETH (36%) is staked.
What is Ethereum’s inflation rate?
Currently about 0.8% a year: +0.82% over the last 365 days and about +0.86% annualized over the last 30 days. By calendar year, supply grew 14.9% in 2016, 7.7% in 2018, 3.5% in 2021 and 2.1% in 2022 (the Merge year), shrank 0.29% in 2023, then grew 0.24% in 2024, 0.72% in 2025 and 0.66% in 2026 through October 18. Since the Merge on September 15, 2022, the average is about 0.33% a year.
How much ETH has been burned?
About 4,641,049 ETH has been burned since EIP-1559 went live in the London upgrade on August 5, 2021, worth about $13.1 billion at the prices when it was burned (ultrasound.money). About 2,017,740 ETH of that was burned after the Merge. Blob fees, added by EIP-4844 in March 2024, have burned only about 4,700 ETH in total. In the last 30 days, about 2,417 ETH was burned.
How much new ETH is issued per day?
About 2,970 ETH a day, or roughly 1.08 million ETH a year, as of October 2026 (ultrasound.money, 30-day rate). All of it goes to validators on the consensus layer; the execution layer has issued nothing since the Merge. Under proof of work, miners alone received about 13,000 ETH a day (ethereum.org). Staking issuance grows with the square root of the total ETH staked, so more staking means somewhat more issuance.
When was ETH deflationary?
Mostly from the Merge to early 2024. Supply peaked at 120,533,305 ETH on October 8, 2022, then fell to 120,063,244 ETH on April 5, 2024, about 458,000 ETH below the Merge level. 15 of the 49 months from October 2022 to October 2026 were net deflationary, the largest being May 2023 (−144,977 ETH). 2023 is the only calendar year in which supply fell (−0.29%). Supply climbed back above its Merge level on February 5, 2025.
What gas price makes ETH deflationary?
With about 2,970 ETH issued a day and blocks using about 30 million gas, the burn matches issuance at an average base fee of roughly 13.6 gwei (ultrasound.money calls this the “ultra sound barrier”). The 30-day average base fee to October 18, 2026 was about 0.37 gwei, more than 35 times lower. The break-even depends on how much gas blocks actually use and how much ETH is staked; use the calculator on this page to try other values.
Does Ethereum have a maximum supply?
No. Ether has no hard cap. New ETH is issued to validators and part of every transaction fee is burned, so supply rises or falls with network use. Bitcoin, by contrast, is capped at 21 million coins by its halving schedule. Since the Merge, ETH’s supply has stayed within about 120.06 to 122.14 million.
Is ETH’s inflation higher or lower than bitcoin’s?
Right now they are about the same. ETH grew 0.82% over the last 365 days. Bitcoin’s block subsidy has been 3.125 BTC since the April 2024 halving, about 164,000 BTC a year, which is roughly 0.82% of its 20.1 million coins (blockchain.com). Bitcoin’s rate halves again around 2028 and is fixed by rule; ETH’s depends on staking and fees.
Can I reuse this ETH supply data?
Yes. Our tables, charts and the two CSV files (monthly and yearly supply) are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Credit “GrowYourEthereum, Ethereum Supply Data (from ultrasound.money), CC BY 4.0” and link to this page. The raw supply figures come from ultrasound.money’s public API, and their terms apply to that raw feed.
Sources
- ultrasound.money: live ETH supply, burn and issuance dashboard (supply-over-time, burn-sums, gauge-rates and base-fee-over-time API endpoints used for every supply figure here)
- ultrasound.money API: ETH supply over time (JSON)
- ethereum.org: How the Merge impacted ETH supply (issuance before and after, the burn, break-even gas price)
- ethereum.org: History of Ethereum forks (London Aug 5, 2021; Merge Sep 15, 2022; Shapella; Dencun; Pectra; Fusaka)
- EIP-1559: Fee market change (base fee burned)
- EIP-4844: Shard blob transactions (blob base fee burned)
- Ethereum consensus specs (Altair): base reward formula, BASE_REWARD_FACTOR = 64
- ethereum.org: Gas and fees
- CoinGecko: Ethereum total and circulating supply (cross-check)
- Blockchain.com: Total bitcoins in circulation
- Bitcoin Wiki: Controlled supply (halving schedule, 21 million cap)
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Educational data page. Not financial, tax or legal advice. Supply figures can be revised by the source. GrowYourEthereum is independent and not affiliated with ultrasound.money, the Ethereum Foundation or any exchange. Figures fetched October 18, 2026, 8 PM ET. This page and its CSV files: CC BY 4.0.