What burning means here

Burning is used loosely almost everywhere. Here it means one specific, checkable thing: the total supply number went down.

What it means here

A token contract publishes a number: the total supply. On Pickle, burned means that number decreased. The tokens are gone in the strongest sense available - not moved, not locked, not held by anyone. Nobody can reverse it, including the project.

You can check it yourself without trusting an announcement. The supply figure is readable by anyone from the contract, and a burn is visible as it going down.

What it does not mean

Sending tokens to an unreachable address is a different thing

A common practice is to send tokens to an address nobody has the key to and call it a burn. The tokens are effectively out of reach - but the total supply figure is unchanged, because they still exist and are still owned by that address.

This site calls that removed from circulation and never calls it burned. If you read "burned" here, the supply went down. It is a small vocabulary decision that makes the claim checkable instead of rhetorical.

The token's own design supports the strict version: only a holder can destroy their own tokens, and there is deliberately no way for an approved application - or the project - to burn tokens you hold.

The number that must come with it

This is the part that is usually missing, and it is the part that decides whether a burn figure means anything.

A token's supply is not the same as the amount actually circulating. Most projects, including this one, release tokens gradually over years to teams, investors and reserves. So in any given period two opposite things happen: burning removes tokens, and vesting releases them.

A burn figure on its own can mean the reverse of what it suggests

If a period burns some tokens while releasing more from vesting, the amount in circulation went up - even though a burn happened and could be announced truthfully. During the early years of a release schedule, that is the normal case rather than the exception.

So wherever this project publishes a burn figure, it is required to publish the tokens released over the same period beside it. If you ever see one without the other, the missing half is the one you want.

What is built

The ability to burn exists in the token contract today: a holder can destroy their own tokens and the supply figure drops.

The system that would do it on the network's behalf - taking a share of fees, buying PKL on the market and destroying it - is designed and not built. There is no contract, no address, and nothing running. In the meantime the share of fees intended for it accumulates in the treasury, because no destination has been configured for it.

So: no automatic buying and no automatic burning is happening. When it does, the figures come with the float number beside them, per the rule above.