Burning HIVE! | How much HIVE is Burned and How? | March 2026

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 of 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 Hive account@burnpost. Now this initiative is runed by Hive account@buildawhale with voting on the comments.
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 2026

Transfers to Hive account@null 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 Hive account@null in February 2021. The column is even cut out for visibility while the transfer is to 200k. This was a transfer made from the previous account that was used to peg the HBD price. In the last period we can see that the overall transfers to Hive account@null are smaller, with a recent spike in January 2026. On average around 300 HIVE per months has been burnt per month in the last period.

Top Accounts Making Transfers to Hive account@null in 2026

Who has been transferring to Hive account@null? Here is the chart for 2026.

Hive account@balaenoptera is on the top here with close 1500 HIVE burned followed by Hive account@hivepredict.

Setting Hive account@null as Beneficiary

Another way for burning HIVE is setting Hive account@null as beneficiary. For the not so familiar what this means, it basically sent the rewards for that post to Hive account@null, burning them.

Here is the chart.

The chart is on a monthly basis.
We can notice the spike in the amounts of HIVE sent to Hive account@null as post beneficiary. This is due to the renewed campaigh by Hive account@buildawhale that is making a daily burn post with multiple comments that can be voted on. Some large stakeholders are using this to burn HIVE.
In the last months around 30k HIVE per month is burned from Hive account@null as beneficiary.

Top Accounts Setting Hive account@null as Beneficiary in 2026

Here is the table for top users that burned HIVE in the period with setting Hive account@null as beneficiary in 2026.

The Hive account@buildawhale account is dominating this chart with 70k HIVE burned in 2026. This is basically for two and a half months.
There is a big drop after this account with the next with 1300 HIVE.

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 2024-2026 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 2026

Here is the table for top users that burned HIVE in the period from acount creation.

The Hive account@bumblegateway account is on the top here, closely followed by Hive account@hive-recovery.
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 Hive account@null in February 2021 with 200k HIVE burned. In the last period we can see the null as beneficiary option taking over.
This shows that account creation fees has the larger potential to burn HIVE.
When we zoom in 2024-2026 we can see the folowing chart:

Here is a clearer representation.We can see the growth starting from January 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 two years.

Cumlative the share from 2020 looks like this:

The account creating fee is still domainating with 69% share, although in the last period it has been a small amount. The null beneficiary comes on the second spot with 24%.

If we consider the regular HIVE inflation with around 2.5 million new tokens created per month plus the conversions that have been adding significant amounts as well, pushing the new HIVE per motnh above 5M, the burnings of 30k HIVE per month are insfignificant.
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.

All the best
Hive account@dalz