Is ETH inflationary right now?
Measured directly from Ethereum block headers and consensus data · data as of 2026-07-27T03:16:29Z (UTC) · block 25,621,396
+0.87% per year at the current burn rate (+2,890 ETH net per day). ETH issues at most roughly 2,919 ETH/day to stakers and burned 29.6 ETH/day over the last measured 24h window.
Why this matters
After EIP-1559 (2021) Ethereum burned enough transaction fees to be deflationary for long stretches — the "ultrasound money" narrative. Burn depends on demand for blockspace: when the median base fee sits below ~1 gwei, the burn no longer offsets staking issuance and ETH quietly flips back to inflationary. This page answers that one question with numbers measured directly from the chain, not with a narrative.
The burn figure above is computed from raw block headers (baseFeePerGas × gasUsed across a
7,200-block window), the supply and staking figures from consensus-layer balance sums. Every number can be
reproduced with a public RPC endpoint — see the methodology.
ETH locked in L2 bridges
| Bridge escrow | ETH | Status |
|---|---|---|
| arbitrum one bridge | 800,866 | ok |
| base portal | 796,739 | ok |
| op superchain ethlockbox | 200,742 | ok |
| robinhood chain bridge | 115,972 | ok |
| zksync shared vault | 63,949 | ok |
| linea message service | 50,971 | ok |
| starknet core | 18,481 | ok |
| scroll messenger | 12,528 | ok |
| worldchain portal | 7,060 | ok |
| zora portal | 2,387 | ok |
| mode portal | 2,144 | ok |
Bridge escrow balances are native ETH held by canonical L2 bridge contracts. Locked does not mean excluded from supply — it is still ETH on L1. A 0.0 balance on a known escrow means the contract migrated, and we mark it as such instead of counting zero.