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 accounts and communities (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
Another big source of burning HIVE can be the HIVE to HBD conversions, but those are two ways and always floating. Lately they have been more inflationary.
The period that we will be looking here is from 2020 to 2025
Transfers to 
Account
Here is a breakdown by month 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 in 2025
Who has been transferring to
The 
Setting as Beneficiary
Another way for burning HIVE is setting
Here is the chart.
The chart is on a monthly basis.
We can notice the spike in the amounts of HIVE sent to
In the last months around 30k HIVE per month is burned from
Top Accounts Setting as Beneficiary in 2025
Here is the table for top users that burned HIVE in the period with setting
The
Account Creation Fees
Another way of 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.
Becouse these months are so dominant on the chart the other ones are barly visable.
When we zoom in 2024-2025 we got this:
This is a bit clearer chart. We can notice there has been a symbolic grothw in the amount of HIVE bunred for new accounts. From under 1k to around 2.5k in the last months.
Top Accounts Burning HIVE from Account Creations Fees in 2025
Here is the table for top users that burned HIVE in the period from acount creation.
The 
All these accounts have used HIVE to create new accounts.
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
This shows that account creation fees has the larger potential to burn HIVE.
When we zoom in 2024-2025 we can see the folowing chart:
Here is a clearer representation.We can see the growth starting from February 2024. The beneficiary part is dominant, account creation fees are second and tranfers to null are almost non existent. Between 20k to 40k HIVE burned per month in the last year.
Cumlative the share from 2020 looks like this:
The account creating fee is still domainating with 72% share, although in the last period it has been a small amount. The null beneficiary comes on the second spot with 20%.
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% now but it can greathly be moved in one direction or another depending on the HBD conversions. 2024 for example was projected around 6%, but ended up with 9.5%. 2025 is projected to 5.5% but it is on the way to end probably around 8%.
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 😊. On the second spot is the beneficiary accout from curation.
