I guess this is now the state of forums/discussion groups in 2026. AI fuelled handwavy shit, “social fork resilience”
To the contrary, most stakers will plonk most of their ETH into their validators; why would you not make some yield on it? It’s not like the waiting time to unstake is that bad. Anyone who is willing to hold ETH long term, and deal with >50% draw downs, is not going to be senstive about a week or so wait. And if we need a new SSD, we don’t need 30 grand worth of ETH to get the job done, there’s a credit card for that.
This is the difference beween words from an actual real staker and your AI hallucinations. I’m tired boss.gif
Thanks for the write-up. I’ve read the draft and the referenced work, and I want to push back on the framing, because the proposal treats ETH holders as an afterthought when they are the party paying for it.
1. This is a tax on the holders who already do the most for the network. Close to a third of supply is staked, and most of that isn’t professional operators — it’s ordinary holders behind LSTs, exchange staking, or a home validator. A per-duty burn cuts their yield directly and permanently. The dilution “saving” handed to the non-staking holder is a fraction of a percent per year; the yield cut for the staking holder is a large share of their total return. That is a transfer from the engaged holder to the passive one, presented as if it were neutral.
2. It changes the deal after people took it. Everyone who staked since the Merge did so under the current reward curve. Predictable monetary policy is one of the few things ETH can still credibly claim over competing chains, and every time the issuance curve is reopened to address a research concern, that claim gets weaker. Tokenized T-bills, restaking products, and other L1s all offer holders yield without asking them to accept a schedule that can be rewritten at any fork. Cutting staking yield makes holding ETH strictly less attractive relative to those options, and I don’t see any modeling in the draft of where that capital goes.
3. The cost is concrete; the benefit is speculative. The thesis behind the taper is that a high stake share is dangerous — LSTs displacing ETH as money, “too much” issuance, and so on. Reasonable people disagree on whether that is a problem at all, and nobody can measure stake elasticity with the precision this parameterization assumes. If elasticity is low, holders eat the yield cut and stake share barely moves — pure loss. If it’s high, stake exits and we’ve traded holder returns for a security reduction. Neither branch is good for the people who actually hold the asset.
4. It hits solo stakers first. A fixed-cost home validator is the marginal exit under lower rewards; an LST provider with fee-based economics and scale is not. The result is more stake concentrated in the largest providers — the exact outcome the taper is supposedly meant to prevent.
Before this goes any further, I’d want to see: (a) explicit holder P&L modeling split by staking vs. non-staking and solo vs. delegated; (b) an analysis of yield-competitive alternatives and capital-flight scenarios; (c) a justification for why this can’t wait for actual evidence that stake share is causing harm. Absent that, the honest description is that this EIP asks ETH holders to fund a research hypothesis, and I don’t see it being viable on those terms.
EIP-8363 demonstrates that Ethereum can pay stakers less. It has not demonstrated that doing so makes Ethereum more decentralized. A smaller parliament is not necessarily a more democratic one.
Three problems remain:
First, the supposed restraint on large providers misunderstands their business. If a provider rejects a deposit and the customer stakes with a competitor, total stake rises anyway. The provider suffers the same yield compression while forfeiting the commission. Capturing competitors’ existing deposits is simpler still: market share grows without increasing total stake. The taper can discourage staking without discouraging consolidation. The counterexample is already in this thread.
Second, protecting solo stakers is an aspiration being advertised as a result. A coauthor has explicitly acknowledged that the proposal does not establish whether lower yields preserve or improve solo-staker share. That is a rather substantial missing exhibit for a decentralization argument. An equilibrium populated by the cheapest, largest, most entrenched intermediaries is still an equilibrium. Mathematics does not award it a certificate of virtue. Author’s concession.
Third, lower dilution is a benefit to holders, not proof of a benefit to the network. At unchanged participation, this shifts returns from staking holders toward non-staking holders. Any additional benefit requires evidence about avoided costs, validator composition, and security.
The draft openly prioritizes lower dilution. Fine. Financial self-interest is perfectly entitled to attend the meeting; it need not arrive wearing a “decentralization” badge.
Before changing the curve, demonstrate who exits, who gains control, and why the resulting network is more resilient. Until then, the redistribution is concrete. The decentralization dividend remains hypothetical.
Withdrawing EIP-8363 from consideration for Hegotá.
EIP-8363 rapidly became one of the most commented-on EIPs in the history of the forum, with 200+ comments in a few weeks. As we progressed through the Hegotà CFI (Consideration For Inclusion) process, several parties in the industry as well as core protocol and client contributors voiced that a fork scoping exercise was not the right venue to settle an issuance policy change.
We agree and we’d rather acknowledge this now than carry on towards Hegotà in this context. The topic is too important and raised too many concerns that it deserves its own process. We commit to giving issuance its own process and we thank the entities such as Lido who offered to help steer such an initiative.
We stand by the motivation of this EIP, in particular: “a very high staking ratio is undesirable for two distinct reasons (…), preserving Ethereum’s security, neutrality and resistance to capture, and protecting ETH’s role as money.” Not everybody immediately relates to both reasons and for others recognizing just one of these reasons is enough to justify a change. Nevertheless, we will all benefit from improving our understanding of the issue and what is at stake. So far, the questions we have faced since we published EIP-8363 can be boiled down to 5 categories:
Security: What does a lower ratio actually secure versus a higher ratio?
Industry impact: What else is built on the yield and what will be the impact?
Curve specs and alternate tools: Is this curve even the right instrument?
Composition: Who is left staking (the effect on the composition of the validator set)?
Decentralization: How will solo stakers be impacted by the reduction?
We already argued a lot, conceded some and adjusted a few points in the very long Ethereum-Magicians thread mentioned supra. For a broader consensus to emerge and a better issuance policy for Ethereum to be designed and adopted, we need a dedicated process. We call for all willing hands to help and contribute to this, please do reach out. Here’s our start at what a multi-node process would look like:
When
What
Output
Nov, Devcon
Issuance Forum 2 (the EthCC 2026 roundtable was the 1st)
Problem statement, objectives, metrics agreed; in-scope objections
Post Devcon & Dec
Workshop 1, async
Each objection closed, narrowed or open-with-evidence; status-quo costed; cascade model stream submitted
Jan
Issuance Forum 3 at Columbia cryptoeconomics workshop (tentative, tbc), async one month and in person the decision forum at the end
Convergence on one feasible proposal (draft EIP) for I*, or the record of why none; transition included
Feb & March
Workshop 2, async two months
Proposal hardening; external review by academics; cascade model feedback; PFI planning
April, EthCC
Issuance Forum 4, in person with Q&A forum
Engage with Core devs and stakeholders, reach CFI / SFI
