About 41 million ETH is staked on Ethereum right now, roughly 34% of supply. Six researchers want the network to stop paying for the next 19 million.
Their proposal would gradually burn validator rewards as staking climbs, hitting a 100% burn once about 60.25 million ETH, half the total supply, is locked up. At that point net issuance goes to zero.
The pitch is scarcity. Cap the dilution of existing holders and you strengthen ETH’s long-term valuation. That’s the theory, anyway, and it’s already splitting the people whose income depends on the answer.
What actually gets destroyed
Staking is how Ethereum secures itself. You lock up ETH, run software that validates transactions, and the network mints new ETH to pay you. Those participants are validators. Burning means the coins get destroyed permanently instead of paid out.
Every 6.4 minutes, at the close of what Ethereum calls an epoch, a slice of each validator’s rewards would be deducted and destroyed rather than redirected somewhere else. That slice rises linearly to 100% as staking approaches the saturation point.
Validators keep doing the same work for the same pay structure. They keep every transaction fee and tip they earn from building blocks. Only the newly created ETH burns.
And the deduction arrives slowly. It phases in over 18 months, with about six months before that while the upgrade ships. Call it two years to adjust.
The authors’ argument is that staking never stops paying
Even if every last ETH were staked, the yield would still sit near 1.5%. There’s always a reason to add more.
Jérôme de Tychey, one of the proposal’s authors, projects more than 70 million ETH staked by January 2028 if nothing changes. Past a certain level, the proposal states, extra stake makes Ethereum less secure rather than more, because the ETH ends up parked with exchanges and staking providers instead of its owners, and small individual stakers get squeezed out.
Six researchers signed it, including Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation. It landed days before the deadline for smaller changes to be considered for Hegotá, Ethereum's next network upgrade.
The queue tells you how one-directional this is
Another 2.5 million ETH sits waiting to be activated, trackers show, a wait of six weeks or more. Nobody is queuing to leave.
Ethereum limits how fast validators can join or exit, so both directions form a line. The cap exists so a large bloc can’t enter or leave fast enough to destabilize the network. Entry queue is ETH waiting to start staking, exit queue is ETH waiting to stop. About 57,600 ETH a day can currently activate.
DeFi’s leveraged staking trade breaks first
Aave Labs chief executive Stani Kulechov said in a blog post that pushing staking rewards toward zero would make ETH borrowing strategies mostly unviable. Much of the ETH borrowed on Aave gets used to buy more staked ETH, data shows. That trade only works while staking yields more than the loan costs.
Mike Silagadze, founder of liquid staking protocol ether.fi, objected to the process as much as the substance.
“EIP released with 48 hours notice for comments,” he wrote on X, calling it “a major network economics change with far reaching implications for all of DeFi.” He added that the change would “self evidently push out solo stakers who aren’t subsidized by the EF or others” and leave staking to “large centralized entities with zero cost of capital,” and that “seven of the top 10 DeFi protocols” would face a capital exodus.
On prices, Silagadze was blunter. “People who stake ETH don’t sell it,” he wrote, arguing the proposal “will halt any new ETH getting staked” and could push tens of billions of dollars of ETH back into circulation.
It probably misses Hegotá
Hegotá is planned for the second half of 2026, focused on structural cleanup, censorship resistance and state size reduction. The inclusion deadline for changes is Aug. 6.
So a fundamental rewrite of Ethereum’s monetary policy, tapering and eventually zeroing consensus-layer staking rewards once 50% of supply is staked, is showing up days before the cutoff. It comes with a draft implementation of roughly 300 lines and no consensus among the validators and stakers whose yields it would cut.
That combination makes a slip to a later fork far more likely than shipping in this one. The authors know it. They note that every month of delay lets the staking ratio climb by about another 1.5 percentage points.
Which is the uncomfortable part of their own case. The mechanism they designed gets weaker the longer it takes to argue about, and arguing about it is exactly what a 48-hour comment window guarantees.
Watch the entry queue over the next six weeks. If 2.5 million ETH keeps grinding through at 57,600 a day with no exit line forming, the authors’ 70-million-by-2028 projection stops looking like a warning and starts looking like a schedule.
