Recently, Ethereum has experienced its longest inflation period in history. Since mid-April, the circulating supply of ETH has increased for 72 consecutive days, adding nearly 50,000 ETH (about $168.7 million). This means that Ethereum is becoming less scarce and the base fee is at a low point in the past two years.
Despite the increase in the number of Ethereum mainnet transactions and the explosion of Layer-2 activity, the base fee has dropped sharply by 90% due to the reduction in competition caused by the "blobs" transaction space reserved for the Layer-2 network in each block after the Dencun update. The reward per block is currently slightly more than 2 ETH (about $6,800), and the fee contribution is less than 2.5%.
Since the merger in September 2022, Ethereum has only been in a state of inflation for a long time in a few cases, the longest of which was 40 days shortly after the hard fork and 30 days at the end of last year. Since the merger, Ethereum has burned 1.71 million ETH (about $5.8 billion), issued 1.36 million ETH (about $4.46 billion), a net reduction of 346,000 ETH (about $1.17 billion), and an annual deflation rate of 0.161%. If the proof-of-work mechanism is still used, the supply will increase by 6.76 million ETH (about $22.87 billion), with an annual inflation rate of more than 3%.