According to Coinbase director Conor Grogan, a total of 913,111 Ethereum (ETH) tokens have been 'permanently lost' due to user error. The aforementioned figure accounts for 0.76% of the total ETH supply.
At the current price, a total of $3.4 billion worth of ETH has been lost.
Such user errors may include accidentally sending ETH to unrecoverable addresses, mistakes in smart contracts, or failed multi-signature wallets.
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For example, the Parity wallet, used by the Web3 Foundation, implemented multi-signature functionality, but the contract managing access to these funds was destroyed. Approximately 306,000 ETH ($95 million at the time) was frozen. No hard fork was released after the incident, and the frozen funds remain visible on-chain.
The now-defunct Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX stored about 60,000 ETH in improperly documented wallets. Some of their ETH is believed to have been sent to incorrect smart contracts.
In 2022, the NFT project Akutars, initiated by former MLB player Micah Johnson, held a Dutch auction for their non-fungible token (NFT) collection. However, two significant errors in the smart contract resulted in a disaster, with $34 million ultimately being unrecoverable.
Thousands of users have also sent ETH to burn addresses or empty addresses due to typos in entering addresses or other reasons. According to Grogan, 25,000 ETH was collectively sent to burn addresses.
However, he also acknowledges that the $3.4 billion figure may be lower than the actual amount of ETH lost. Notably, this figure does not include lost private keys.
At the same time, approximately 5.3 million ETH tokens have been burned after EIP-1559, which was introduced in the London hard fork in 2021.
