On July 27, Coinbase executive Conor Grogan stated that according to his statistics, at least 913,111 ETH have been permanently lost due to user errors, accounting for over 0.76% of the ETH supply, valued at approximately $4.3 billion. If combined with the ETH burned by EIP-1559 (5.3 million), more than 5% of all ETH in history (valued at $24.2 billion) has been permanently destroyed.
Some of the largest Ethereum permanent locks in history include:
Web3 Foundation lost 306,000 ETH due to the Parity Multisig vulnerability;
Quadriga lost 60,000 ETH due to a smart contract failure;
Akutars lost 11,500 ETH in a Non-Fungible Token minting failure;
Users collectively sent 25,000 ETH to a destruction address for unknown reasons;
Conor Grogan added that the $4.3 billion figure is far lower than the actual amount of lost/inaccessible ETH, only covering cases of Ethereum being permanently locked, such as not including all lost private keys or forgotten Genesis wallets, with statistics sourced from various public reports and queries.
