Hive has been around since March 20, 2020. Let’s take a look how we are doing when it comes to burning HIVE.
The initial option that was built-in for burning HIVE was the promote option. On the old chain there was a promote section tab, that was mainly not used by almost anyone. Now this tab is no longer on Hive.Blog so the initial idea for burning HIVE is not available now.
Peakd have developed their own model for promotion and burning HIVE and it seems that it is used a bit. Not on a massive scale though, but yet there is some.
Other options for burning HIVE are the cost for creating account and community (3 HIVE) and also for making proposals.
In the past there were a few initiatives for burning tokens with setting null as beneficiary on posts like the 
From technical standpoint we can summarize the burning options in three sections:
- Transfers to null
- Null as post beneficiary
- New accounts creation fee
The period that we will be looking here is from 2020 to 2024
Transfers to 
Account
Here is a breakdown by date for HIVE transferred to null.
The chart is on a monthly level.
Here we can see that there is one big burn event with transfers to
Top Accounts Making Transfers to
Who has been transferring to
The 
On the second spot is the 
Setting as Beneficiary
Another way for burning HIVE is setting
Here is the chart.
The chart is on a monthly basisi.
We can notice the spike in the amounts of HIVE sent to
In the last months around 20k HIVE per month is burned from
Top Accounts Setting as Beneficiary
Here is the table for top users that burned HIVE in the period with setting
The 
Account Creation Fees
Another way for burning HIVE is from the creation of HIVE accounts.
Here is the chart.
The chart is on a monthly basisi.
We can notice the spike in the amounts of HIVE burned from account creation fees back in September - October 2021. In this period Splinterlands created a lot of accounts and burned a lot of HIVE in the process. Close to 2M HIVE was burned in a period of three months.
In the other months this number is very low, with around 700 HIVE burned per month. There is some small spike in the last month April 2024 with close to 20k HIVE burned from account creation.
Top Accounts Burning HIVE from Account Creations Fees
Here is the table for top users that burned HIVE in the period with setting
Splinterlands is by far on the top here with 2M HIVE burned from creating accounts. On the second spot is the 
Cumulative HIVE Burned
Here is the chart for the cumulative HIVE burned by category.
Here we can see the dominance in the burns from the account creation fees in September 2021 by Splinterlands and the one big transfer to
In total there is around 200k HIVE burned with sent to null, 100k from null as beneficiary and 2M from account creation fees.
This shows that account creation fees has the larger potential to burn HIVE.
When we zoom in 2023 – 2024 we can see the folowing chart:
Here is a clearer representation.We can see the growth in the last month of this period. The beneficiary part is particaly notebale, while the account creation fees have spiked only in the last month. Between 25k to 40k HIVE burned per month in the last months, compared to the around 1k per month in the last year.
If we consider the HIVE inflation with around 2 million new tokens created per month (depending on HBD prinitng), the sum above is small. There is some effort for impleenting systematic sollution to burn HIVE, like the way Peakd is doing it, but this has obviously not scaled.
Burning HIVE is mainly about reducing inflation. Infation is a long debated topic here and the point is that it can be easely offset by growth and demand. The official inflation is around 6.5% now but it can greathly be moved in one direction or another depending on the HBD conversions. HIVE to HBD conversions can have a lot more powerfull impact in the amount of HIVE removed from circualtion, but I have not included those one here since that HIVE is not techicly burned but it has changed form so to speak and can in theory be returned back.
From the above we have seen that creating new accounts has been the largest source for burning HIVE. While this has mostly happened in a one time spike it is still has the most effective way for burning HIVE. We just need to onboard users 😊.
