Great point from Rhett here. Trying to save $1 billion in “excess printing” misses the forest for the trees. ETH’s issuance is basically lower than gold’s supply inflation and below most low-inflation commodities. We are talking about a rate that the market has already shown it can absorb. For gold this is a non-issue because there’s enough global demand that it doesn’t matter all that much. That’s the problem we need to solve for ETH, and EIP-8363 inadvertently kills a primary demand driver, which is the ETH economy itself. The US dollar is another example; it dominates because of the productive economy underneath it. That’s why the US is so adamant about protecting its global demand drivers, for better or worse. The same applies to ETH. The value comes from the economy built on top of it, and that economy runs on the staking yield. Tens of billions in collateralized lending, liquid staking, and institutional products all reference the staking rate as their baseline. Risking the primary economic engine that gives ETH its utility is solving the wrong problem.

Another thing I want to reiterate is that decisions around staking yield do not happen in isolation. We have to measure the downstream effects. In 2023, liquid staking tokens became low-risk collateral after staking withdrawals were enabled, and borrowers started using them across lending markets. Active loans climbed by around 40x by late 2025 from the 2022 bottom. As an ecosystem we made ETH a productive asset, with a base rate, and that base rate made the credit market we see today possible. ETH and its liquid staking derivatives now make up over half of all DeFi lending collateral. If we aggressively reduce this yield, potentially to zero in certain scenarios, we risk handicapping a market that is on the cusp of reaching every goal we've ever set out to accomplish. The entire credit infrastructure that keeps Ethereum at the center of onchain finance was built on this rate in the last few years. These things must, without exception, be factored into every decision made around ETH yield going forward.

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