Ultrasound money is a nickname for ETH built on one claim: Ethereum's fee burn can make ETH's supply shrink, out-scarcing even Bitcoin's fixed cap. For roughly eighteen months after 2022, that was literally true. As of 2026 it is not, because ETH's supply is growing slowly again. This guide covers the meme's origin, the burn, and what still holds.
What does "ultrasound money" actually mean?
Ultrasound money is the claim that Ethereum's automatic fee burn can shrink ETH's total supply over time, making ETH scarcer than Bitcoin, the original "sound money." Sound money means money that nobody can print at will. The meme pushes that idea one step further: a currency whose supply does not just stop growing but actually falls.
The phrase only makes sense as the last step in a chain, so let us walk the chain.
Gold. For centuries, gold was the classic sound money. Nobody could conjure more of it, so it held scarcity in a way paper currency could not.
Bitcoin. Bitcoin took that idea digital. Its rules permanently limit it to 21 million coins, a hard cap, meaning a ceiling written into the code itself. Our guide on Bitcoin's 21 million cap covers why that limit exists. Fans call Bitcoin sound money because its supply schedule is fixed and predictable, the opposite of currencies that can be printed. The wider argument sits in our piece on Bitcoin versus fiat inflation.
The ETH riff. Ethereum burns, meaning permanently destroys, a slice of every transaction fee. When the network is busy enough, the amount destroyed can exceed the amount of new ETH created. Supply falls. The joke writes itself: if a fixed supply is sound, a shrinking supply must be ultra-sound.
Notice what kind of statement this is. It is not just a slogan. It is a measurable claim about supply, and you can check it against on-chain data on any given day. That is what makes the meme interesting, and also what makes it risky to repeat without a date attached. The claim can be true in one year and false in the next, because it depends on how heavily people use the chain. The rest of this guide checks it honestly, era by era.
Where did the term come from?
The term came out of Ethereum's research community in September 2020 and was popularized by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake. Supporters signal it with a bat and a speaker emoji, 🦇🔊, because bats find their way using ultrasound, sound pitched too high for human ears. If Bitcoin is sound money, the joke goes, then shrinking ETH is ultrasound.
The emoji pair became a badge. During 2021 and 2022 you could spot supporters across crypto social media because they pinned the emoji pair into their display names, the same way Bitcoin supporters use laser eyes. A whole live dashboard, named ultrasound.money after the meme, sprang up to track the burn in real time (source: CoinLedger).
The detail beginners miss: the phrase was coined before the burn even existed. Drake floated it publicly in September 2020 with a simple riff: if capped-supply Bitcoin is sound money, then ETH with a shrinking supply is ultrasound money (source: Bitcoin.com News). But the rule that burns fees did not go live until August 5, 2021. So ultrasound money began life as a prediction, a bet that the coming burn would be strong enough to shrink supply. For a while, as we will see, the bet paid off. That origin matters for how you should hear the phrase today. It was never a neutral description. It was an argument made by people who wanted Ethereum's new fee design adopted, wrapped in a meme so it would travel. Memes travel well, but they do not update well. Plenty of posts still repeat the 2021 version of the claim as if nothing has changed since. Something big has, and we will get to it. First, the mechanics underneath the meme.
How does the burn actually work, block by block?
Every Ethereum transaction pays a base fee, an automatic minimum charge set by the network, and that fee is destroyed instead of being paid to anyone. The rule is called EIP-1559 and has run since August 5, 2021. Each block burns its collected base fees, so a little ETH disappears every time a block is produced.
Here is what happens in one block, step by step.
A block arrives. Ethereum produces a new block, a bundle of confirmed transactions, roughly every 12 seconds.
Each transaction used gas. Gas is the unit Ethereum uses to measure computational work. A simple transfer uses a little gas; a complex trade uses more.
Gas used times base fee equals the burn. The network multiplies the gas each transaction used by the current base fee per unit of gas. That total is sent to an unspendable address, a destination no private key can ever open. The ETH is gone for good (source: EIP-1559 specification).
Only the tip survives. Users can add a small tip on top of the base fee, and that tip goes to the validator who made the block. The tip is the only part of the fee anyone receives.
One more piece makes the meme click. The base fee is not fixed. It adjusts automatically, block by block, based on how full recent blocks were. A crowded chain pushes the base fee up, so each block burns more. A quiet chain lets it fall, so each block burns almost nothing. That is why the burn is a mirror of demand, not a steady drip. The full machinery of gas pricing belongs in our future guides on Ethereum gas and EIP-1559, and how the burn nets against new ETH across the whole supply is the job of our ETH tokenomics guide. For this article, hold on to one image: every 12 seconds, a block lands, and its base fees turn to ash.
When was ETH actually deflationary?
ETH's supply genuinely shrank for roughly eighteen months, from the Merge in September 2022 until the Dencun upgrade in March 2024. Before that it managed single deflationary days, the first in September 2021. Since April 2024 the supply has been growing again. So the meme was literally true for a stretch, just not permanently.
Here is the full record, era by era.
Period | What happened | Supply direction |
|---|---|---|
August 5, 2021 | EIP-1559 goes live; the burn begins | Growing, more slowly |
September 2021 | First single day when the burn beat new ETH | Shrank for a day |
May 2022 | Otherside NFT mint burns about 55,800 ETH in one weekend | Briefly shrinking |
September 15, 2022 | The Merge cuts new ETH creation by roughly 88 percent | Shrinking begins in earnest |
Late 2022 to March 2024 | Sustained deflation; supply falls from about 120.5 million to about 120.0 to 120.1 million | Down roughly 450,000+ ETH |
March 13, 2024 | Dencun upgrade makes Layer-2 data posting cheap; the mainnet burn collapses | The turning point |
April 2024 onward | New ETH outpaces the burn again | Growing |
2026 | Mild growth of roughly 0.2 percent a year | Growing slowly |
Three rows deserve a closer look. The Otherside mint, a frenzied weekend sale of NFT land in May 2022, burned about 55,800 ETH, worth roughly $157 million at the time, and briefly pushed the burn past even the heavy issuance of the old mining era (source: Decrypt). Then came the long middle act. After the Merge slashed new ETH creation, the burn won consistently, and total supply fell by more than 450,000 ETH to around 120.0 to 120.1 million by March 2024 (source: Cointelegraph). During those months, ultrasound money was simply accurate.
The Dencun upgrade ended that run. It gave Layer-2 networks, the cheaper chains that settle back to Ethereum, a cut-price way to post their data. Activity stayed cheap, mainnet fees fell, and the burn shrank with them. From April 2024, ETH turned inflationary for the first sustained stretch since the Merge (source: CoinDesk). Nothing about the burn rule changed. What changed is how much fuel it gets.
What does the burn look like in 2026?
In 2026 the burn runs far below new ETH creation. On the quietest days the network destroys only tens of ETH, roughly 50 to 70, while it issues roughly 2,600 new ETH to validators. Per block, that is about a third of an ETH created against 0.007 to 0.01 ETH burned. The creation side is winning comfortably.
One block, both flows. Let us do the arithmetic in the open, using rough 2026 figures. Ethereum produces a block about every 12 seconds, which works out to roughly 7,200 blocks a day. Issuance, the new ETH the protocol mints for validators, scales with how much ETH is staked (source: ethereum.org issuance), and with roughly a third of all ETH staked it runs close to a million ETH a year as of 2026, roughly 2,600 a day (source: Datawallet). Divide 2,600 by 7,200 and you get roughly 0.36 ETH of new supply per block. Now the other side. The quietest recent days have burned as little as roughly 50 to 70 ETH in total (source: MEXC News). Divide that by the same 7,200 blocks and each block destroys roughly 0.007 to 0.01 ETH. One honest footnote to the math: the burn figure is a quiet-day floor while the issuance figure is an average, so the everyday gap is somewhat narrower. Even so, picture one block as a scale: about a third of an ETH lands on the creation side, and a fraction of a hundredth burns away on the other.
Why so small? Base fees in 2026 typically sit below one gwei, around 0.1 to 0.5 gwei, where a gwei is a billionth of an ETH. Cheap blockspace means a thin burn. From Blofin's operational perspective, the burn is something we watch rather than influence. The same sub-gwei base fees that make ETH cheap to move on mainnet in 2026 are exactly why the burn runs far below issuance, and no exchange can change either side of that equation. The issuance side, meanwhile, flows to validators as staking rewards, a topic our guide on staking in a crypto portfolio picks up.
Now invert the question: what would it take for the burn to win again? An increase of well over an order of magnitude in the burn, sustained, not a one-weekend spike. That means mainnet demand strong enough to push base fees well above today's levels and keep them there. It can happen. It has happened before. But it is a condition to watch for, not a state ETH currently lives in. None of this is a forecast, just the arithmetic of the two flows.
How accurate is "ultrasound money" today?
Partly accurate, partly out of date. The burn is real and large in total, with roughly 4.6 million ETH destroyed since 2021, and new ETH creation stays low by design. But ETH has not been deflationary since April 2024, and in 2026 its supply is growing slowly. Treat the phrase as a conditional claim, not a description of today.
Here is the scorecard, with both columns graded fairly.
Claim inside the meme | The record as of 2026 | Grade |
|---|---|---|
Fees really are destroyed | Roughly 4.6 million ETH burned since August 2021 | Accurate |
New ETH creation was slashed | Cut roughly 88 percent at the Merge; even if every ETH were staked, issuance tops out near 1.5 percent a year | Accurate |
ETH supply can shrink | It did, by roughly 450,000+ ETH between the Merge and March 2024 | Accurate, past tense |
ETH supply is shrinking now | Supply has grown since April 2024 and is back above its Merge-day level of about 120.5 million ETH, rising roughly 0.2 percent a year in 2026 | Overstated |
ETH is automatically scarcer than Bitcoin | Only true while the burn beats new ETH, and nothing guarantees that | Conditional |
Critics add two standing objections that the scorecard supports. First, a supply that depends on usage is unpredictable by design, so "shrinking" was never something ETH could promise the way Bitcoin promises its cap. Second, Ethereum's supply rules can themselves be changed through upgrades, a flexibility the Dencun episode put on display. Neither objection says the burn is fake. Both say the meme oversells how firm the outcome is.
The most telling update came from the meme's own champion. In February 2025, Justin Drake wrote that ETH's supply was then growing at about 0.5 percent a year and said his bat signal would return when ETH is "ultra sound" again (source: Gate Learn). Read that carefully. He did not declare the idea dead. He paused it, which is exactly what a conditional claim deserves when its condition stops holding.
That is the fair way to hear the phrase in 2026. The machinery is intact: fees still burn in every block, and the rules have not weakened. What lapsed is the outcome, because activity moved to cheaper layers and starved the burn of fuel. Whether the condition returns depends on future mainnet demand, which nobody can promise. If you want the broader design contrast behind the meme, our guide on Bitcoin versus Ethereum lays it out, and the full supply picture lives in our ETH tokenomics guide.
Frequently asked questions
Is "ultrasound money" an official Ethereum term?
No. It is a community meme, not a protocol concept. The phrase appears nowhere in Ethereum's rules, and the EIP-1559 specification that defines the burn never mentions it. It spread through researcher posts, conference talks, and the bat-and-speaker emoji in supporters' display names. The lesson for beginners: a popular phrase can describe a real mechanism while still carrying a marketing slant, so check the mechanism, not the slogan.
Does the burn make my transactions cheaper?
No. The base fee is set by demand for blockspace, and the burn only decides where that fee goes, not how big it is. Without the burn, you might pay the same amount, and validators would simply keep more of it. If anything, the burn was designed to make fees more predictable, not lower. The small tip you add on top still goes to the validator either way.
Could the burn rule ever be changed or removed?
Yes, in principle. Ethereum's rules are software, and the community can change them through coordinated network upgrades. The Dencun upgrade in 2024 showed how an upgrade can reshape the burn's size without touching the burn rule itself, simply by changing where activity happens. Any direct change to fee burning would be debated publicly for a long time before going live, so it could not happen quietly or overnight.
Did the 2025 gas limit increase affect the burn?
It plays into it. Ethereum's block gas limit, the ceiling on how much work fits in one block, rose to 60 million in late November 2025, ahead of the Fusaka upgrade on December 3, 2025 (source: The Block). More room per block means less competition for space, which tends to keep base fees, and therefore the burn, low. Bigger capacity helps users and works against scarcity at the same time.
Where can I watch ETH issuance and the burn live?
The best-known tracker is the dashboard named after the meme itself (source: Ultrasound.money). It shows new ETH issued, ETH burned, and the supply change since the Merge, updated in real time from on-chain data. You do not need an account, and you can verify every claim in this article against it. Checking a live dashboard beats trusting any article's snapshot, including ours, because supply figures move daily.
Researched and written by the Blofin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. Primary sources include the EIP-1559 specification from eips.ethereum.org and the Ethereum issuance documentation from ethereum.org, with burn and supply history drawn from Cointelegraph, CoinDesk, Decrypt, and the Ultrasound.money on-chain dashboard, and 2026 figures from dated 2026 market coverage. All facts independently verified against cited sources current as of June 2026.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice, investment guidance, or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any digital asset. ETH supply, issuance, burn, and staking figures are protocol-driven and on-chain measures that change frequently and are presented as approximate ranges as of 2026, not as quotes or forecasts. Whether ETH is inflationary or deflationary at any moment depends on network activity. Cryptocurrency markets involve significant risk, and you should conduct your own research and consult qualified professionals before making decisions.