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Kevin O’Leary of ‘Shark Tank’ espouses deflationary future for Ethereum

Shark Tank star, “Mr. Wonderful,” argues that Ethereum is destined to become “ultrasound money” once its chain merge occurs.

Canadian entrepreneur, investor, and reality television personality, Kevin O’Leary — also known as “Mr. Wonderful” — appears to now be singing Ethereum’s praises as a deflationary asset.

Clearly reading from a script, O’Leary took to Cameo — a website that allows users to purchase personalized video messages from celebrities — to espouse the benefits of Ethereum’s August 5 London upgrades. Most notably, the upgrades saw EIP-1559’s highly awaited burn mechanism introduced into Ethereum’s fee market.

“It introduced a very important change to the monetary policy of Ethereum,” said O’Leary. “Currently the fees that users pay to send transactions go to the miner, but after this improvement, the fees will be burned.”

“When you combine this with EIP-3675, which switches the network to Proof-of-Stake, [...] Ethereum will become deflationary,” he concluded, adding:

“If Bitcoin is sound money because of the $21 million supply ceiling [Ethereum] is ultrasound money because there is no supply floor.”

At the time of writing, it has been five days since Ethereum’s highly anticipated 1559 improvement proposal went live.

According to Ultrasound.money, a website tracking the rate at which Ether is being burned through transaction fees, estimating that roughly 20,500 Ether (roughly $63.75 million) have been burned so far.

Related: Ethereum could pave way for $100,000 Bitcoin, Bloomberg analyst asserts

While a firm date for Ethereum’s forthcoming chain merge — which will complete the network’s transition to Proof-of-Stake consensus — is yet to be announced, experts are predicting the merge will occur in early 2022.

Last month, the chain merge was formalized as an Ethereum Improvement Proposal for the first time. Now dubbed EIP-3765, the upgrade was formalized through the creation of a pull request on GitHub.

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Ethereum London upgrade launches on testnet as 100K staked in a day on Eth2

The Ethereum community is anxiously awaiting the mainnet launch of EIP-1559.

Ethereum’s forthcoming London upgrade, containing the highly-anticipated Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559, has been deployed on the Ropsten testnet.

Following the June 24 launch on Ropsten, London is now expected to progress through Ethereum’s Goerli, Rinkeby, and Kovan testnets at roughly weekly intervals — from which point the Ethereum community expects a date for mainnet deployment to firm up.

The new upgrade will see transaction fees burned. According EIP-1559 tracking website, Watch the Burn, roughly 88,500 testnet ETH nominally worth $177.6 million has been burned on Ropsten over the day since London’s deployment.

The high rate of Ether being burned on Ropsten has reignited discussion regarding whether EIP-1559 will render Ethereum deflationary — where more ETH is destroyed than new supply enters into circulation — and what this could mean for Ethereum’s price moving forward.

However, EIP-1559 is not the only upgrade that the community is looking forward to from London, with David Mihal of CryptoFees describing EIP-3074 as “fixing one of Ethereum’s most overlooked security issues” to do with approvals.

Related: A London tour guide: What the EIP-1559 hard fork promises for Ethereum

Coincidentally or not, crypto data aggregator, CryptoQuant, identified that 100,000 Ether had been deposited into Eth2's staking contract around the same time as the launch, worth roughly $200 million.

CryptoQuant also noted that more than 5% of ETH’s supply is currently locked in staking worth approximately $11.75 billion.

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