Ethereum‘s (ETH) total supply has increased by more than thirty-five million ETH since 2016. The total supply now is slightly below one hundred and ten million (107mn) coins, and that is a huge difference from 2016 when it was only slightly above seventy million ETH (72mn).
This huge rise in supply was not expected by even Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. In fact, the current amount is almost ten million more than what Vitalik expected it to reach till 2025. According to VItalik Buterin, the crypto’s supply would have only reached slightly below one hundred and four million coins (103,862,556) by the year 5000.
Buterin had miscalculated significantly and had even stated that in the foreseeable future, Ethereum’s supply would no go much higher than one hundred million. However, as we soon found out that was not the case.
The biggest source of error in his judgment was caused by the assumption that any delays to the difficulty bomb will also respect the general Ethereum supply growth curve. However, the difficulty bomb has been delayed twice, causing the supply growth trajectory to shift each time.
Difficulty bomb, according to Investopedia, is the term used to indicate the increasing difficulty of ETH mining. This causes an increase in the time taken to mine one block of Ethereum blockchain.
These delays have caused Ethereum supply growth trajectory to shift enough to issue coins worth one and a half-billion dollars. Moreover, the last issuance decrease was also reduced as the issuance decreased form two ETH to two ETH instead of one.
The next difficulty bomb is expected to occur in March with currently no signs of any delay. This will increase block mining time from fifteen to thirty seconds in 2020.
Moving on the block mining time will increase to a minute by early 2021. Ethereum 2.0 is also expected to launch around that time. So perhaps there is no need for delaying the difficulty bomb this time.
