Proof of Burn

Proof of burn is a mechanism in which participants send coins to a provably unspendable address — 'burning' them — in order to earn something in return, such as the right to mine or validate on another chain, or an allocation of newly issued tokens. Because the burn address has no known private key, the destroyed coins can never be recovered, and anyone can verify the sacrifice on-chain. Proof of burn has been proposed as a lower-energy alternative to proof of work and used for fair-launch distributions and cross-chain migrations. It differs from a routine token burn done to manage supply, though both permanently remove coins from circulation. Burns are irreversible: send to the wrong address and nothing can be undone.