Roughly 34% of ETH’s supply — about 41 million coins — is currently staked on Ethereum. A group of six researchers now argues the network should stop paying for the 19 million that would come next.
Under their plan, validator rewards would be burned on a rising curve as staking grows, reaching a full 100% burn at around 60.25 million ETH, or half of all supply. Net issuance would sit at zero from there.
Scarcity is the selling point. Limit how much existing holders get diluted, the reasoning goes, and ETH’s long-run valuation gets firmer. Whether that holds is already dividing the very people whose paychecks hinge on the outcome.
What actually gets destroyed
Ethereum’s security runs on staking. Participants lock ETH, operate validation software, and receive freshly minted ETH from the network in return. Those participants are called validators. A burn means the coins are wiped out for good rather than handed to anyone.
At the end of each epoch — Ethereum’s term for a 6.4-minute window — a portion of every validator’s rewards would be subtracted and destroyed, not rerouted elsewhere. That portion scales up linearly to 100% as staking nears the saturation threshold.
The job and the pay structure stay the same for validators. Transaction fees and tips from block building remain entirely theirs. It is only the newly issued ETH that goes up in smoke.
The deduction also ramps in gently: an 18-month phase-in, preceded by roughly six months while the upgrade itself is shipped. Two years, effectively, to adapt.
The authors’ argument is that staking never stops paying
Stake every last ETH in existence and the yield would still land somewhere near 1.5%. The incentive to pile on more never quite disappears.
Proposal co-author Jérôme de Tychey forecasts that staking will top 70 million ETH by January 2028 on the current trajectory. Beyond a certain threshold, the proposal contends, additional stake weakens Ethereum’s security instead of reinforcing it, since that ETH gravitates toward exchanges and staking providers rather than staying with its owners — squeezing out small individual stakers along the way.
The document carries six researcher signatures, among them Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation. It surfaced just days ahead of the cutoff for smaller changes to be weighed for Hegotá, Ethereum's next network upgrade.
The queue tells you how one-directional this is
Trackers put another 2.5 million ETH in line waiting to be activated, a backlog running six weeks or longer. There is no comparable rush for the door.
Because Ethereum throttles how quickly validators can enter or leave, queues form in both directions. That ceiling is there so no large bloc can pile in or bail out fast enough to knock the network off balance. The entry queue holds ETH waiting to begin staking; the exit queue holds ETH waiting to stop. Activation capacity currently runs at roughly 57,600 ETH per day.
DeFi’s leveraged staking trade breaks first
Writing in a blog post, Aave Labs chief executive Stani Kulechov said driving staking rewards toward zero would render ETH borrowing strategies largely unworkable. Data shows a large share of ETH borrowed on Aave is deployed into buying more staked ETH — a trade that only pencils out while staking yields exceed borrowing costs.
Mike Silagadze, who founded liquid staking protocol ether.fi, took issue with how the proposal arrived as much as with what it says.
“EIP released with 48 hours notice for comments,” he posted on X, describing it as “a major network economics change with far reaching implications for all of DeFi.” The change, he added, would “self evidently push out solo stakers who aren’t subsidized by the EF or others” and hand staking to “large centralized entities with zero cost of capital,” while “seven of the top 10 DeFi protocols” would see capital drain away.
His take on price was sharper still. “People who stake ETH don’t sell it,” he wrote, contending the proposal “will halt any new ETH getting staked” and could send tens of billions of dollars’ worth of ETH back into circulation.
It probably misses Hegotá
Slated for the back half of 2026, Hegotá centers on structural cleanup, censorship resistance and shrinking state size. Aug. 6 is the deadline for changes to make the cut.
Which means a wholesale rewrite of Ethereum’s monetary policy — tapering and ultimately zeroing out consensus-layer staking rewards once half the supply is staked — has landed with only days to spare. It arrives with a draft implementation of about 300 lines and nothing resembling consensus among the validators and stakers whose yields would take the hit.
Put those together and a slide to a later fork looks far likelier than inclusion in this one. The authors are aware of that. Each month of delay, they note, adds roughly another 1.5 percentage points to the staking ratio.
That is the awkward corner of their own argument. The longer the debate runs, the less potent their mechanism becomes — and a 48-hour comment window all but guarantees a long debate.
Keep an eye on the entry queue over the coming six weeks. Should that 2.5 million ETH keep churning through at 57,600 a day with no exit line materializing, the 70-million-by-2028 figure reads less like a warning and more like a timetable.