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there's about $20b worth of eth in the weth contract. $1.1m of eth has been lost this way (so op's lost weth is about 45% of all weth lost from transfers). https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead...

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Crypto gets dumber by the day.

What’s the other 20b worth of eth for?

people send eth to get weth back, weth is an erc20 wrapper for eth - wrapped eth

most smart contracts that deal with tokens (swaps, borrowing, etc) use the ERC-20 standard. WETH is a simple smart contract where you deposit X eth and you receive x weth in return (where weth is a token that adheres to the ERC-20 standard). you can then use that weth to swap, borrow and lend in the same way you would with any other erc-20 token.

most users never have to deal with the WETH contract because defi platforms will automatically do the wrapping/unwrapping for you.

the vast majority of the WETH minted by this contract is used for

a) providing liquidity on DEXs (where ~ 50% tokenA and 50% tokenB are deposited to collect trading fees)

b) collateral in a lending platform (e.g. deposit WETH and borrow USDC)

c) bridged to another chain (e.g. bridge WETH to Avalanche or Solana or whatever)

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