{"id":14,"date":"2026-06-25T12:31:04","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T12:31:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hoge.gg\/se\/eip-1559-explained\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T12:31:04","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T12:31:04","slug":"eip-1559-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoge.gg\/se\/eip-1559-explained\/","title":{"rendered":"EIP-1559 f\u00f6rklarat f\u00f6r icke-utvecklare \u2014 och varf\u00f6r br\u00e4nningen \u00e4r viktig"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

At 12:33:42 UTC on 5 August 2021, Ethereum block 12,965,000<\/strong> activated the London hard fork and with it EIP-1559<\/a>, the most significant change to the network’s economics since genesis. From that block onward, the fee market stopped being a sealed-bid first-price auction and became a two-part mechanism with an algorithmic base fee that the protocol burns<\/em>. As of 1 March 2026, cumulative ETH burned since activation sits at 4.51 million ETH<\/strong>, worth roughly 11,3 miljarder SEK<\/strong> at current prices. The supply curve of Ethereum was permanently reshaped that day, and a lot of people still describe the mechanism wrong.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

What is at stake here is two things at once. First, the user experience: before 1559, wallets had to guess a single gas price into an opaque auction and routinely overpaid by 20-50%. Second, the monetary policy: by burning the base fee, the protocol creates a sink that offsets new ETH issuance, which under proof-of-stake has flipped the network into net-negative issuance during periods of high activity. Understanding both layers \u2014 the auction reform and the burn \u2014 is what separates a casual reader of the market page<\/a> from someone who can actually read ultrasound.money<\/a> och know what the dashboard is showing.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Det pre-1559-problemet, i ett stycke<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Before this reform, every Ethereum transaction included a single gasPrice<\/code> field. Miners ordered the mempool by that price, descending, and packed the block. Wallets had no reliable estimator, so they over-bid to make sure they got in. The protocol had no concept of block fullness; the only signal was the empirical bid distribution. When demand spiked (the 2017 CryptoKitties weekend, the 2020 yield-farming summer), users would pay 10\u00d7 the necessary fee because there was no way to detect that the marginal bidder had stopped bidding. The original EIP-1559 FAQ by Vitalik Buterin<\/a> walks through the inefficiency in detail.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Vad 1559 faktiskt g\u00f6r \u2014 tre \u00e4ndringar, i ordning<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The proposal authored by Buterin, Eric Conner, Rick Dudley, Matthew Slipper, Ian Norden, and Abdelhamid Bakhta makes three concrete changes. First, it introduces a base fee<\/strong> that the protocol calculates from the previous block’s gas usage. Second, it allows users to add a priority fee<\/strong> (commonly called the "tip") that goes to the validator. Third, it burns the base fee<\/strong> by sending it to address 0x0<\/code> where it can never be spent.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The base fee adjusts each block. If the previous block was exactly at the gas target \u2014 currently 15 million gas<\/strong> out of a 30 million max \u2014 the base fee stays the same. If the block was full, the base fee rises by 12.5%<\/strong>. If empty, it falls by 12.5%. Over twenty blocks (four minutes), the base fee can swing by roughly an order of magnitude. This makes gas predictable on short horizons: the next block’s base fee is mathematically determined the moment the current block is sealed.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Br\u00e4nningen \u2014 vad det \u00e4r, vad det inte \u00e4r<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The burn is the single most misunderstood part of 1559. It is not<\/em> a tax. It is not paid to the foundation, to validators, or to a treasury. The base fee is destroyed at the protocol level, reducing the total ETH supply. The economic case Vitalik makes in his 2021 sharding post<\/a> and again in the Ethereum roadmap<\/a> is that burning the base fee aligns user incentives with holder incentives: the network’s most-used moments are also when its currency becomes more scarce.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Period<\/th>ETH burned<\/th>Average base fee (gwei)<\/th>Net issuance<\/th><\/tr><\/thead>
Aug 2021 – Dec 2021 (first 5 months)<\/td>1.23M ETH<\/td>87<\/td>+0.42M ETH<\/td><\/tr>
2022 (full year)<\/td>1.45M ETH<\/td>34<\/td>+0.31M ETH<\/td><\/tr>
Sept 2022 – Sept 2023 (post-Merge year)<\/td>0.94M ETH<\/td>27<\/td>-0.36M ETH<\/td><\/tr>
2024 (Dencun year)<\/td>0.51M ETH<\/td>14<\/td>+0.18M ETH<\/td><\/tr>
2025 (post-Pectra)<\/td>0.38M ETH<\/td>9<\/td>+0.24M ETH<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table>
ETH-br\u00e4nning och nettoutsl\u00e4pp per period. K\u00e4lla: ultrasound.money, etherscan.io\/chart\/ethburned, mars 2026.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Two things stand out from the table. First, the Merge in September 2022 cut new issuance by roughly 90% by replacing proof-of-work mining rewards with proof-of-stake validator rewards. Combined with the 1559 burn, this is what produced the only twelve-month period in Ethereum history where supply actually shrank. Second, EIP-4844 in March 2024 moved most rollup data off the regular gas market and into a separate blob market, which lowered base fees and therefore the burn. Net issuance turned mildly positive again, not because monetary policy changed, but because the underlying demand for block space relocated.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Varf\u00f6r detta \u00e4ndrade anv\u00e4ndarbehovet, direkt<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Within a month of the London fork, wallets converged on a much simpler bidding strategy. Instead of guessing a gas price, you set two values: a maxFeePerGas<\/strong> (the ceiling you are willing to pay) and a maxPriorityFeePerGas<\/strong> (the tip). The actual price you pay is min(maxFee, base + priority). If you set maxFee to 100 gwei and the base fee turns out to be 12, you pay 12 + your tip, not 100. The wallet refunds the difference. This is documented in MetaMask’s transaction docs<\/a> and was implemented by every major wallet within sixty days.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The empirical result, measured by Paradigm in July 2021<\/a> and confirmed by Coinbase’s post-London analysis<\/a>, was a 10-15% reduction<\/strong> in median user fees paid for equivalent transactions, holding base fee constant. Users stopped overbidding because the protocol guaranteed they would only be charged the realised base. The auction inefficiency that had cost the network billions in cumulative overpayment was retired in a single hard fork.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Vad 1559 inte l\u00f6ste<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It did not make gas cheap. It did not eliminate MEV; in fact, the priority fee channel became a clean signal for searchers to bid into, and MEV-Boost<\/a> now routes most validator income through a separate proposer-builder auction. It did not change the gas limit<\/em>, which still constrains total throughput. And it did not address the cross-chain fragmentation that has since become Ethereum’s bigger UX problem.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n