Doge-coin knockoff Shiba Inu is burning record amounts of ether, the native crypto of the Ethereum blockchain.
Want more mining insights like this?
Ether burning hit a one day record high of 14,818 ETH or about $59 million on October 27, a tailwind effect of the Ethereum-based memecoin’s massive price gains and trading volume. The token’s price gained 177% over last seven days alone and had over 25 billion dollars in real trading volume Wednesday, according to Messari.
That’s good for more than double the combined daily volumes of both Bitcoin and Ethereum over the same 24 hour period.
Ethereum programmatically burns ether with every block produced. Higher demand to settle on-chain – such as buying or selling Shiba Inu on a decentralized finance (DeFi) exchange – generally increases burn volumes. The large ether burning made October 27 the first fully “deflationary” day in Etheruem’s history. Meaning, more ether was burnt than created in 24 hours.
The Shiba Inu contract on Ethereum is now the sixth most called smart contract of all time with over 360,000 unique calls, according to Dune Analytics. For context, the USDC stablecoin contract has about 3 times as many calls.
Unfortunately, miners have reaped little benefit from the increased demand to transact on-chain. Ethereum hashprice has remained near constant over the past month, according to Coin Metrics.