Human Error Causes $3.4B Ether Loss, Says Coinbase Exec
913,111 ETH, approximately 0.76% of Ethereum's circulating supply, has been lost due to user error and bugs, valued at over $3.43 billion. Including 5.3 million ETH destroyed via Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559 (EIP-1559), the total lost Ether reaches around 6.2 million ETH, accounting for 5% of the current supply of 120.7 million ETH. The amount lost has surged 44% since March 2023, with significant losses attributed to incidents like the Parity Multisig bug (306,000 ETH), Quadriga (60,000 ETH), and Akutars (11,500 ETH). The reported figures do not account for all inaccessible ETH, such as lost private keys. Ethereum's supply is flexible, lacking a hard cap unlike Bitcoin, but issuance has been constrained by EIP-1559 and the Merge, leading to a slight decline in supply since September 2022.
