Burning STEEM has been on a lot of people mind lately. We can see that a lot of tribes are implementing this and for some it seems to be working. Burning tokens represents a sort of anti inflationary measure and can contribute a lot for the token price.

STEEM at the moment don’t have a lot of ways for burning tokens. The one thing that is strictly made for that is the promotions feature in the promotion tab. Other than this, there is no official usage to burn STEEM.

Lately we are seeing more initiative to burn STEEM. Setting null as beneficiaries is one of the things that can be seen. Some projects like @smartsteem are also promoting burning STEEM. Send STEEM to null and your post will be reviewed by Smartsteem curation team. You may get upvote or not. Not guaranteed.

Here I will be looking into transfers to the @null account and beneficiaries reward for the null account as well. For those who don’t know the @null account is a special account that burns STEEM and SBD. When STEEM or SBD is sent to this account it is removed from the supply and doesn’t stay in the null account wallet, unlike the SE tokens. You can check this here https://steemitwallet.com/@null/transfers.

Transfers to @null account

Below is the all time chart for the STEEM transferred to the @null account.

A total of 26540 STEEM transferred to @null account.

The first transfer to the @null occurred in august 2016. Since then a total od 26k STEEM was sent to null. Having in mind the STEEM inflation around 60k to 80k daily, and the total supply more than 300M, this is a small amount of STEEM burned.

What is clear from the chart is that there is a clear spike in the STEEM burned in the last months. In September 2019 there was more than 6k STEEM burnt, and the last few months basically represent the majority of the total STEEM burnt. Lest hope this trend keeps on growing.

SBD transfers to the null account.

Since our blockchain has a dual curency system lets take a look how is SBD doing. Here is chart.

A total of 205995 SBD transferred to @null account.

Obviously there is much more SBD burnt than STEEM. If we take a look at the chart we can see that the SBD burn happened mostly when STEEM prices were high, and STEEM was more valuable then SBD, with price above 1$.

There was a large SBD transactions between June 2017 till October 2017. Not sure why exactly.
In the last year SBD was almost not tranfered to null, ecept for the last two months. There is a small increase in the SBD burnt in August and September 2019, but jus a small ammount. September have 953 SBD transferred to null.

Setting @null as beneficiary

Lately there is initiative to set @null or the @steem.dao as a beneficiary. Let’s see how much STEEM was burned in this way.

A total of 5054 STEEM transferred to @null as beneficiary account.

Well not much. If we take a look at the chart this is happening onlt in the months after the Hardfork. I have added October here as well just for illustration, although the month is not over yet and there will be more tokens burnt.

Total STEEM and SBD Burned

In total the STEEM and SBD burnt until September 2019 is as follows:

Token	Amount
STEEM	29,805
SBD	205,995

We can say there is a room for improvement 😊.

Obviously there is an upward trend for STEEM burnt in the last months and especially after the Hardfork. This is nice to see. But this need to be much more if we like to counter the inflation. More users coming to the Steem blockchain will eat up that inflation, but when there is not much of them, the inflation is starting to put pressure on the price.
The burning thing is only one side in the overall Steem ecosystem, and there is much more reasons why are we here.

In the end having much more ways to burn STEEM in the future cant hurt anyone 😊.

All the best
@dalz