The supply of ETH has risen to the level before the merge upgrade, and analysts say that the Dencun upgrade may be the cause of inflation.

PANews news on February 5th, according to The Block, the supply of Ether has reached its highest level since January 2023, which is equivalent to the level before the merge update on September 15, 2022. Data from ultrasound.money shows that the current supply of Ether is 120,521,523 ETH, which is about 383 ETH higher than the supply on the day of the merge upgrade. Jaehyun Ha, an analyst at Presto Research, said that last year's Dencun upgrade of the network was the reason for the inflation of Ether supply, and the status of Ether as a "ultrasound money" (a kind of Deflationary asset, making it a superior store of value compared to Bitcoin) may be at risk. Jaehyun Ha said, "With the launch of Dencun upgrade, Ethereum has added support for blob transactions to more efficiently handle large data loads (especially L2)." "These transactions use a separate fee unit called 'blob gas', which is different from the standard gas fee applicable to regular transactions." Due to the transfer of a large number of transaction activities to blob transactions, this change has led to a decrease in the proportion of destruction fees. "Reducing costs means that even if overall network activity is still high or growing, the balancing effect that previously restricted the net supply of ETH is now less apparent."