How to burn tokens

Burning is one transfer to an address nobody holds the key to. It needs no special contract and costs nothing beyond gas.

What burning actually is

There is no magic to it. You send tokens to an address that provably has no private key, most commonly 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000dEaD. Nobody can sign a transaction from that address, so the tokens stay there permanently.

Because it is an ordinary transfer, you can do it from any wallet. Lockbox charges nothing for it, and some platforms charge around $12 for the same transfer. What is worth having is not the burn but the record, and we give that away too.

Doing it

1. Open the burn page and connect your wallet.
2. Paste the token contract address and enter the amount.
3. Type BURN to confirm, because this cannot be undone by anyone.
4. Sign one transaction. There is no approval step, because no contract takes your tokens.

When it confirms you get a link to a page that proves the burn, reading the transaction itself. Share that rather than a screenshot.

It does not reduce total supply

This surprises people. Tokens at a dead address are unreachable, but they still exist and still count towards the token's reported total supply. A chart will not show supply falling.

Only a token with its own burn function, which destroys the tokens rather than moving them, can lower the reported figure. If your token has one, calling it directly reduces supply properly. Either way the tokens are gone for good, but the two read differently to anyone looking at supply numbers, and claiming supply fell when it has not is the kind of thing people check.

Proving a burn that already happened

Lockbox builds a burn's page from its transaction receipt, not from a database of burns bought through us. Any burn on Robinhood Chain or Arc has a page, including ones made years before, from any wallet, through any tool. If you have the transaction, you have the proof.

You can also see the running total for any token: what share of supply sits at dead addresses, counting every burn the chain has ever seen. Look up a token in the explorer.