Ethereum total supply to be finally pinned down?
According to Coinbase, its open-source Ethereum Rosetta API implementation supports balance tracking, including internal and external ETH transfers.
As per the San Francisco-based exchange, the problem of inability to calculate the total Ethereum supply, which hit a boiling point in August, can be solved by its “rosetta-ethereum.”
Launched just a month after rosetta-bitcoin, this open-source specification makes it easy for “anyone to track all Ethereum balance transfers (including “internal transactions”) without relying on a third-party service or a collection of one-off scripts.”
Unlike Bitcoin, which only involves block rewards, to calculate Ethereum supply, one needs to consider not only genesis and mining rewards but also “uncle rewards.”
Uncle rewards are blocks that didn’t make it into the blockchain and exist to improve decentralization. They can further have “nephews.”
Moreover, those ETH that has been erased from the network, which happens on rare occasions when a smart contract is set to self-destruct and send its fund to itself, also needs to be deducted from the supply.
When we released Rosetta, an open-source specification that makes integrating with blockchains simpler, faster, and more reliable, the top request from the community was an Ethereum implementation. Today, we are proud to open-source Rosetta Ethereum. https://t.co/DL4KyTglzq https://t.co/qR1rL8m34S
— Coinbase (@coinbase) October 26, 2020
Besides helping track all ETH balance transfers, Rosetta-Ethereum also makes it easier to create, sign, and broadcast transactions without maintaining a network-specific SDK or network-specific signing logic.
It will also allow safe balance lookups with assurance to get account data from blocks they didn’t expect.