Instead of the invisible process of ETH being destroyed under EIP-1559, BETH was created to give the act of burning Ethereum a tangible and trackable form.
When users send ETH to the designated contract, it forwards the funds to an irretrievable burn address and also mints an equivalent amount of BETH on a 1:1 basis. The result is that each BETH token functions as a transparent, audit-ready receipt for ETH that has truly been removed from circulation. This means that the more BETH tokens created, the more the number of ETH that have been permanently removed from circulation.
Despite its potential use cases, BETH is only a token that signifies the burn activity of users. As such, Zak Cole noted that BETH is meant strictly as a receipt and should not be treated as a token with inherent value. Nonetheless, it is easy to argue that turning burned ETH into a token might undercut the point of burning altogether
ETH burning on the Ethereum blockchain officially began on August 5, 2021, with the activation of the London hard fork. That upgrade introduced EIP-1559 (Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559), which fundamentally changed Ethereum’s fee mechanism. Instead of all transaction fees going directly to miners, the base fee for each transaction started being burned and permanently removed from circulation.
