Lost Crypto Fortune: 20% of Bitcoin Gone Forever—Is Ethereum Next?
The crypto graveyard keeps growing—Bitcoin's vanished coins now represent a staggering 20% of its total supply. Poof. Gone. Like a hedge fund manager's credibility during a bear market.
But what about Ethereum? The smart contract giant isn't immune to wallet amnesia either. While exact figures are murkier than a DeFi protocol's whitepaper, chain analysis suggests ETH losses could follow a similar trajectory.
Where do the coins go? Buried in hard drives tossed in landfills. Locked in wallets with passwords scrawled on Post-its lost to time. Or—more cynically—sitting untouched in early miners' cold storage while they 'wait for the next ATH.'
One thing's clear: In crypto, scarcity isn't always by design. Sometimes it's just pure human negligence—the ultimate decentralized feature.
More Than 5% Of Ethereum Supply Gone Forever
In an X report, crypto researcher Conor Grogan revealed that a significant amount of ETH has actually been lost over time. In its 10 years of operation, there have been mishaps and user errors that have led to notable amounts of ETH being locked/inaccessible forever.
The first part of the report focused on instances of user errors that have led to hundreds of thousands of coins being completely lost forever. The researcher pointed to at least 913,111 ETH, worth over $3.43 billion, representing more than 0.76% of the total supply being lost already.
One of these instances is the Web3 Foundation’s Parity Multisig bug that led to 306,000 ETH being locked forever. Then, a faulty contract saw 60,000 ETH from Quadriga being trapped, as well as the Akutars’ NFT mint that saw 11,500 ETH trapped after the mint went awry. Additionally, there is over 25,000 ETH sitting in a burn address that has been sent by users.
The research also includes the infamous Rain Lõhmus wallet, which holds 250,000 ETH in it. The lore around this is that Lõhmus had spent $75,000 to purchase the coins back when Ethereum launched. However, the entrepreneur and LHV Bank founder had lost his keys and has been unable to access the wallet, which now sits at almost a staggering $1 billion.
Moving beyond just user error alone, then the number of ETH that have gone out of circulation shoots up much higher. When Grogan added in the total ETH burned after the implementation of EIP-1554 back in 2021, the figure ROSE to over 5.3 million ETH. This translates to a dollar value of around $23.5 billion, accounting for more than 5% of the total Ethereum supply.
However, the crypto researcher explains that this still does not include instances of where users have lost their private keys or forgotten Genesis wallets. Taking this into account, the amount of lost ETH is probably much higher, making it hard to pinpoint.
In contrast to Ethereum’s figures, it is estimated that around 20% of the Bitcoin supply is lost forever. Since the Bitcoin supply is capped at 21 million coins, then any lost supply means there is less available supply for investors in the market. This makes lost BTC even more impactful than lost ETH, given that the Ethereum supply is not capped and continues to climb.
