Billions of dollars worth of Ethereum (ETH) have been lost forever due to one simple reason, according to Coinbase director Conor Grogan.
In a post on the social media platform X, Grogan says that based on his research, a “minimum” of 913,111 ETH, worth about $3.43 billion, has been lost forever due to user error.
The lost coins represent about 0.76% of the supply of ETH, according to Grogan.
Among the biggest losses was when the Web3 Foundation – a major crypto-supporting nonprofit – lost access to 306,276 ETH due to a bug in the Parity multisig wallet software.
Grogan also notes that when accounting for Ethereum’s EIP-1559 burn mechanism, about $23.42 billion or around 5% of all ETH ever made has been permanently destroyed.
And the number gets even bigger when considering the amount of ETH that aren’t necessarily gone forever, but likely inaccessible due to lost private keys.
“To be clear, this $3.4 billion+ number significantly undershoots the actual lost/inaccessible ETH amount. It just covers instances where Ethereum is locked forever.
For example, it doesn’t cover all lost private keys or things like Genesis wallets that have been forgotten.”
At time of writing, ETH is trading at $3,869, up nearly 60% in the last month.
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