Over $3.4 billion in Ethereum lost forever due to user mistakes and contract bugs

More than 913,111 ETH has been permanently lost due to user and contract-related errors, according to Conor Grogan, a director at Coinbase.

At current prices, that amounts to approximately $3.43 billion in inaccessible assets, which represent over 0.76% of Ethereum’s total circulating supply.

Grogan highlighted several major incidents that have contributed to this significant number of irreversible ETH losses.

Topping the list is the Web3 Foundation, which lost 306,000 ETH due to a vulnerability in the Parity multisig wallet. The defunct Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX lost 60,000 ETH through a faulty smart contract. NFT project Akutars mistakenly burned 11,500 ETH during a botched minting process.

Additionally, users have inexplicably sent over 25,000 ETH directly to burn addresses, permanently removing them from circulation.

Losses could be higher

Meanwhile, Grogan emphasized that the $3.4 billion figure is a conservative estimate.

According to him, the figure only accounts for provably inaccessible ETH, such as coins trapped in flawed contracts or burn addresses. It does not include ETH tied to lost private keys or dormant wallets from Ethereum’s early days, like Genesis wallets that haven’t moved funds in years.

He also pointed out that the figure is significantly higher when factoring in Ethereum’s destruction via the EIP-1559 burn mechanism, with more than 5.3 million ETH permanently removed from circulation. This total exceeds 5% of all ETH ever minted and represents over $23.4 billion in value.

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