Circle (CRCL) shares rose about 10% in premarket trading Wednesday after the stablecoin issuer reported second-quarter earnings that topped profit expectations, even as revenue came in slightly below Wall Street forecasts.
The company posted adjusted earnings of 18 cents a share, beating analysts’ consensus estimate of 16 cents, while revenue and reserve income rose 7% from a year earlier to $701 million, missing expectations of $712 million. Net income from continuing operations reached $48 million, topping analysts’ estimates of $43 million, while adjusted EBITDA climbed 8% to $143 million.
$USDC, Circle’s dollar-backed stablecoin, continued to expand. Circulation reached $73.3 billion at the end of June, up 19% from a year earlier, but down from its 2026 peak of nearly $80 billion. Onchain transaction volume surged 151% to $14.8 trillion during the quarter.
“Our quarterly financial results reflect the current rate environment and a crypto market that has slowed,” CEO Jeremy Allaire said in a statement. “But the institutions using $USDC today, like BlackRock, BNY and Standard Chartered aren’t piloting, they are expanding.”
The earnings also offered the clearest update yet on Arc, Circle’s blockchain network scheduled to launch its public mainnet on Sept. 16.
There’s an old saying that “every coin has two sides.” It applies perfectly to the multimillion-dollar hack of the hardware wallet Coldcard that began on July 30 and is still in progress.
On one hand, the hack raised questions about the safety of taking direct custody of coins in hardware wallets as a long-term holding strategy, a technique that became popular following the collapse of the FTX exchange in 2022.
On the other hand — and this is the bright side — it spurred the shuffling and reshuffling of coins to exchanges and multiple wallets alike by holders.
This bright side is evident from key data, starting with the number of transactions sitting in Bitcoin’s memory pool awaiting confirmation from miners. That count has spiked since late July, reaching 89,031 on Tuesday, the most since February 2025, according to data from Blockchain.com (check the Daily Signal).
Other metrics reveal the same picture. According to>
Increasing network activity is often said to support valuations for the network’s native coin, bitcoin BTC$64,032.44. So far, the token has neither rallied nor dropped significantly and remains boxed in the recent range of $62,000–$65,000.
Analysts continue to point to the fate of the Clarity Act as the immediate catalyst while citing longer-duration government bond yields as a more macro and longer-lasting one.
“CLARITY is still the immediate policy binary. The Senate has a three-day window before its August 10 recess, while the implied probability of passage by year end has fallen to 23% from around 75% in mid-May. A push to attach prediction-market restrictions adds another process risk,” analysts at Marex said.
Meanwhile, Bitfinex said the bullish macro case for bitcoin could collapse if the real or inflation-adjusted yield on the U.S. 10-year Treasury note tops 2.5%.
“The 10-year real yield has not stayed above 2.5% since before Bitcoin existed, so there is no price history above that line. It is now at 2.41%, nine basis points below,” the exchange said.
Stay alert!
Read more: For analysis of today’s activity in altcoins and derivatives, see Crypto Markets Today . For a comprehensive list of events this week, see CoinDesk’s “Crypto Week Ahead.”
Michigan democratic senate primary candidate Abdul El-Sayed says the government is meant to be ‘for the people’ as he and Haley Stevens remain neck and neck with votes still being counted.
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The date is much closer to the timeline sought by state attorneys general and the Writers Guild America, who sued to block the transaction, rather than a trial start this fall favored by Paramount.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, based in Oakland, wrote that the trial will take place from March 2 to March 19 of next year.
Paramount had sought a November trial start; the state AGs and the WGA proposed April.
The judge wrote that the trial will run from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., with two 15 minute breaks. The trial will be dark on March 8 and March 15.
A Paramount spokesperson said in a statement, “We respect the court’s decision and continue to believe a trial on the merits is the best and most direct way for us to prove what we’ve said from the start – this transaction is lawful, pro-competitive, and raises no antitrust concerns. The lawsuit against us has no basis in fact, economics or antitrust law. We will continue to vigorously defend the transaction and remain committed to closing as soon as possible so its benefits for the creative community and consumers can be realized.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is leading 11 other state AGs in challenging the merger, did not comment.
The date of the trial is hugely important for Paramount, which will be on the hook to pay Warner Bros. Discovery $7 million for every day that the transaction doesn’t close after September 30. That was Paramount’s deal sweetener as it competed with Netflix for the legacy studio and other assets.
The merger itself has an expiration date of June 4 of next year, and Paramount agreed to a $7 billion termination fee if the transaction did not close due to regulatory issues. The judge has not given any timeline as to when she would make a decision after the trial.
A month ago, it looked as if Paramount may be on its way to closing the transaction this summer, as it racked up regulatory approvals around the world. But Bonta and the other states filed an antirust lawsuit to block the transaction on July 13 and then won a temporary restraining order to put the merger close on hold for at least four weeks. Paramount then moved to go directly to trial, arguing for the earlier date, albeit even a November trial would cost them tens of millions in ticking fees.
Among other things, in a filing last week, Paramount warned that a trial next spring would require them to refile merger materials with the Justice Department, which has already cleared the transaction, because a waiting period expires on Feb. 19.
“A trial after that date would require the parties to re-do regulatory work that has already been completed,” the company’s legal team said in its filing last week. “This burden is not limited to the United States but will also be applicable in other jurisdictions where pre-closing regulatory review and clearance has been obtained. Redoing work that has already been done to the satisfaction of government agencies around the world serves nobody’s interests.”
The state AGs and the WGA, however, wrote that they needed extensive discovery. They pointed to the collection of materials on “the definition of the relevant product and geographic markets, the nature and scope of harm in those markets, whether expansion by other firms will prevent harm in those markets, and whether the merger will produce verifiable, merger-specific efficiencies sufficient to outweigh harm in those markets.”
The company said that that the later date would leave the creative community in a period of uncertainty, as Paramount plans to boost production to 30 films per year.
The judge set an initial case management conference for Aug. 19, with a joint case management statement due on Aug. 13.
A few years ago German writer-director Felix Randau (Iceman) got what sounded like an interesting proposal from France: to direct episodes of a miniseries about Felix Kersten, the former massage therapist of Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler.
“When I got back to Berlin and read their concept, I really liked it,” he recalls. “But there was this one special sentence in it that said, ‘If Steven Spielberg had known about Felix Kersten, he would have shot a film about Felix Kersten and not about Oskar Schindler.’ I knew that Steven Spielberg struggled for, I don’t know, about 10 years before he started shooting Schindler’s List, and he’s a smart guy who has a lot of assistance. So I became suspicious and started my own research, going to the archives and reading a lot of books and stuff.”
In the process, he realized that Kersten’s legacy is much less clear-cut. “I figured out that the story the French guys wanted to shoot was a hero story, a superhero story,” Randau tells THR. “But I felt you simply cannot do it.” He soon started focusing his work energy elsewhere.
The result is his new film, I Is Another (Ich Ist ein Anderer), which world premieres on Friday, Aug. 7 in the Piazza Grande program of the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. Set in 1952, the film sees a journalist ambush Kersten and his wife on a train because she has doubts about the heroic narrative that he has been presenting about himself — one that might even get him the Nobel Peace Prize. What starts as a normal interview quickly turns into a psychological cat-and-mouse game. Is Kersten a hero or an impostor? Or could he maybe be both?
“Every story has three sides,” Randau says in a director’s note. “Yours. Mine. And the truth…”
To explore all these complex themes, I Is Another features a cast of big European names, led by Danish star Claes Bang (The Square, Bad Sisters, Home) as Felix Kersten, Austria’s Valerie Pachner (The Stories, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Four Minus Three) as journalist Hedda, fellow Austrian Susanne Wuest (Sound of Falling) as Kersten’s wife Irmgard, German actor Timocin Ziegler as Hedda’s husband Winfried, and Germany’s Martin Müller as Himmler.
Felix Randau, courtesy of Felix Randau
The film, whose cinematographer was Sebastian Thaler, was edited by Joana Scrinzi. Beta Cinema is handling international sales.
For writer-director Randau, I Is Another is much more than a post-war film — and much more timely. “Of course, it’s a period movie, but it has a lot to do with our present time,” he tells THR. “It’s about truth and the question: what is truth? Nowadays, there are no more fundamental agreements about anything, so truth has become quite a flexible thing. And that’s very dangerous, as we all can see. So, I Is Another is a movie about that.”
Indeed, the themes of truth and image that the movie explores seem tailor-made for the social media age. “If Felix Kersten was alive today, he would be deep into all this social media shit, I’m pretty sure,” Randau acknowledges.
But he highlights the ambiguities and shades of gray that he sees in Kersten that the writer-director wanted to also showcase in I Is Another. “He was a narcissist. He was an opportunist,” says Randau. “But I think he also was a hero somehow because he saved some lives. Not thousands, as he said, but he saved some lives. And I think he saved lives not for good reasons. He wanted to save his own ass, I think.”
Where in the film’s facts turn to fiction doesn’t really matter much, according to the filmmaker, because much of how people feel about Kersten depends on whether they focus on his autobiography or facts and stories told by others. “All the scenes with Himmler and Kersten are from Kersten’s autobiography,” Randau explains. “So they are, I think, all fake, but it is his truth. All the other stuff, the journalist and the train ride and stuff like that, is invented. It’s fiction. But somehow it’s also true.”
Director Felix Randau and stars Claes Bang and Valerie Pachner during the shoot for ‘I Is Another,’ courtesy of Anke Neugebauer/ostlicht/Wega
Of course, to bring the story of Kersten and the themes that I Is Another explores to life, Randau needed a strong cast. “I’m really proud of our casting,” he tells THR. “They all were great and added so much.”
Randau reached out to Bang first to cast him as Kersten. The Danish star had never heard about the massage therapist. “I did not know about any of this until Felix brought it to me, and it’s quite interesting because it seems to be a story that everybody’s quite fascinated by when you retell it,” the star tells THR in a Zoom chat during a break from filming the Netflix series Assassin’s Creed. “It’s a story that’s really gone under the radar, even if it’s a quite crazy one.”
The team may have spent quite a few years getting the financing for the movie together, but the actor remained up for it throughout. “Ever since he brought it to me, I’ve been really into it and really wanted to do it,” Bang recalls. “I really felt strongly about this. So I stayed with it, and we managed to make it last summer. We had to do it quite fast because there wasn’t a massive budget. I think we had 24 shooting days altogether, which is a stretch for something like this. Everybody really put in a massive effort. Everybody was so devoted to it, and that is something that I will carry with me.”
How did he think about Kersten and what was key for portraying the character? “It’s really hard to find out what is actually the truth here,” Bang observes. “But what’s interesting is that if this guy hadn’t been so preoccupied with his legacy, then we would have had no story to tell. It’s only because it seems that after the war, he was not quite content with the credit he was given for what he had done, and therefore he started perhaps exaggerating.”
For the Danish star, Kersten’s story is about the human need for validation: “Ultimately, Kersten wants the Nobel Peace Prize because that would validate him. That whole thing of not being able to just trust yourself and knowing that you have done your bit seems weird and wild.”
Claes Bang as Felix Kersten and Martin Müller as Heinrich Himmler in ‘I Is Another,’ courtesy of Anke Neugebauer/ostlicht/Wega
Courtesy of Anke Neugebauer/Ostlicht Filmproduktion/Wega Filmproduktion
The fact that a prominent world leader has been desperately hoping (some might say whining) for a Nobel Peace Prize is not lost on Bang. “Obviously, we have Trump at the moment who is seeking the exact same validation. I mean, he also so desperately wants the Nobel Peace Prize. I know that the parallel is too much. But actually it’s more about … when can we just trust ourselves and know in our hearts ‘I have done my bit.’ Why can’t we just find our inner peace?”
Adds Bang: “What intrigued me, and that’s probably also something that I can really relate to and recognize in myself because I really very often wonder, ‘Why do I need that bloody validation from everywhere else? Why do I need the reviews to say that I’m great? Why do I need people to come up to me and say, Wow, that was a great movie.’ Why isn’t it just enough for me just to be whatever I am?”
In case you wonder: Bang and his director on I Is Another weren’t at all concerned with him trying to look like the real-life Kersten, which he doesn’t — at all. “That is not the story we’re trying to tell here. We’re trying to tell a story of the journey of a soul,” the star emphasizes. “This is not the wax museum of Madame Tussauds. So that was never important.”
Pachner was game for the role of the journalist immediately. “I loved the title, and the film’s themes were something I felt I could really connect with,” she tells THR. “It’s this idea of what you tell yourself and others about yourself, and how that can be very far from the truth. And what is the truth? Felix Randau also plays with our own idea of what’s true and right. And there is this autobiography that Felix Kersten wrote and how people took it as fact just because he wrote it. So, yes, the film is set after the Second World War, but with talk about fake news, it also feels very modern.”
Valerie Pachner as journalist Hedda and Claes Bang as Felix Kersten in ‘I Is Another’
Courtesy of Anke Neugebauer/Ostlicht Filmproduktion/Wega Filmproduktion
She adds that the character of Hedda is more complex than she may appear. “I was really happy to explore that because it felt so rich,” says Pachner. “It’s not this young journalist who is just this good girl who wants to get to the bad guy. She has her own very twisted and dark story. I’m so happy when I get to play a woman where not everyone says, ‘Oh, she’s so nice.’”
In fact, Pachner enjoyed teasing that her character isn’t sure who she is or wants to project to be either, very much like Kersten. “As Hedda, I didn’t know who I was,” she shares. “Is me another? Who is I? Or maybe I just want to be different. And I think she really wants to be. That struggle tells us that maybe she and Kersten are not that different.”
Pachner had never met any of the other cast members, but she felt a natural chemistry with them once shooting got underway. “We all enjoyed doing the scenes with the four of us, the two couples,” she says. “It just flowed. These weird relationships were kind of there, and there was such a rich history behind Hedda’s relationship with her husband. The Kerstens play these weird mind games with the younger people. I enjoyed working with all of them so much. They’re all really, really great actors.”
Wuest was also fascinated by the themes explored by the film, and couldn’t help but notice parallels to our current moment. “I feel that the timing of the film is so spot on for so many reasons,” she says. “First of all, it’s all about the image you create of yourself, and how manipulative that is. It’s like on social media where it’s not only about the ego; it’s about selling something all the time. And the film is about the questions of who do we want to be and how do we want to be perceived from the outside. That has become more important than creating a community, which I think is very toxic. I think it is a dead end.”
Director Felix Randau and stars Claes Bang and Valerie Pachner during the shoot for ‘I Is Another,’ courtesy of Anke Neugebauer/ostlicht/Wega
She adds that the movie also ties in with a troubling political trend that’s been on the rise throughout the world: “The second thing is the rise of all the right-wing radical politicians and ideologies again, which I think go hand-in-hand with this me, me, me culture. The film tells a story about that and perspective. You have at least three, if not four or five, different perspectives. You have the perspective of Felix Kersten. You have the perspective of the journalist who’s trying to get to him. You have the perspective of his wife. You have the perspective of the poor journalist’s husband. And then you have the perspective of the audience who also has a take on it. Plus, then you have the perspective of the person who tells the story, which is the director. So there are a lot of layers.”
Wuest concludes that I Is Another is much more timely than audiences may at first expect: “We live in very strange times, and I think the film covers and mirrors that.”
As mentioned before, the Kerstens of I Is Another look nothing like the real-life couple, and Wuest lauds director Randau for “allowing different ideas to happen.” Such as when they were trying out different looks for Irmgard.
Says Wuest: “I was putting on makeup, and we were discussing what she could look like. I thought her prime was in the 1930s, maybe in the 1940s even. And people tend not to change hairstyles every decade. We keep the hairstyles we grow up with. And because this story is being told by Felix Karsten, we get to see his memory and his idea of everything. So, Felix Karsten and his wife don’t see each other the way they really look, but more like this Hollywood couple. I really love that the film twists these things and ideas.”
The tech giant and the entertainment giant have inked what they are calling a “first-of-its-kind” content sharing deal, which will allow TikTok videos from Disney fans to live on both of their streaming platforms.
The deal bears a striking similarity to last year’s short-lived announcement with OpenAI to fold videos from Sora into Disney+… but without the whole AI-generated angle. Creators who opt-in to the program will gain access to Disney assets (think photos and videos featuring Disney characters and IP). A “thoughtfully curated” selection of videos will live on both TikTok and in Verts on Disney+.
The companies also say that they “will enable best-in-class creators to unlock special rewards and provide them with increased visibility, access to exclusive events and career development pathways,” making it a two-way street of engagement. The partnership will launch in the U.S. in the next couple months, with plans to eventually bring it to other markets.
“The best storytellers are fans first,” said Asad Ayaz, chief marketing and brand officer for Disney. “That has always been true at Disney, and today, fans are celebrating our stories in entirely new ways. This collaboration creates a new bridge between the stories we tell and the creativity they inspire, giving creators a bigger stage to share what they’ve made, and audiences more to discover on Disney+ every day.”
“Creators are at the heart of everything we do at TikTok. Their creativity extends the life of films and shows into conversations that fans discover and share,” added Dawn Yang, global head of entertainment for TikTok. “Together with Disney, we’re bringing the authentic creator expression of the TikTok community to Disney+, inviting audiences to experience the shared creativity that makes fandom so powerful.”
The deal will inevitably turbocharge Disney’s Verts offering, with the company teasing the possibility of creator content there when it launched in March. Vertical video has become a top priority for streamers, recognizing that consumers who watch videos on their phones are just not likely to turn it sideways in most use cases. Peacock, HBO Max, and Netflix have all also rolled out enhanced vertical video offerings in recent months.
But the Disney-TikTok tie-up also recognizes the role that creators are playing in fandom, with fand of characters and IP, be it Marvel Star Wars or Moana, often turning to social video platforms to dissect, discuss and celebrate those characters and worlds.
The U.K. Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that outdoor poster ads for “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” breached its code by presenting an image that gave “a realistic impression of a dead child,” while clearing companion TV and streaming spots for the same campaign.
The ASA investigated four issues stemming from several complaints about ads for the Warner Bros Entertainment U.K. Ltd. cinema release, seen in April this year. The regulator upheld one complaint and rejected the other three in a ruling published Aug. 5.
“The ASA received 30 complaints, many of whom believed the ads were distressing for children and adults,” the ASA said.
Posters on the London Underground and at outdoor sites showed a close-up of a mummified female figure with grey, ashen skin, cracked lips and one eye swollen shut, wrapped in material resembling a shroud and inscribed with hieroglyphic-style symbols.
The ASA said the figure’s features gave “a realistic impression of a dead child” and that the material wrapped around her added to that impression. Because the posters ran in untargeted locations, including on the London Underground and at a site visible from a children’s nursery, the regulator concluded the imagery was likely to distress young children who saw it. It ruled the posters unsuitable for outdoor display in that form, finding them in breach of CAP Code rules 1.3 and 4.2.
Warner Bros. had argued the poster’s neutral expression, open eye and absence of a sarcophagus or restraints were deliberate choices meant to reduce distress, and noted the studio’s outdoor buying policy of keeping horror titles at least 100 metres from schools – a standard that does not extend to nurseries.
The ASA ordered that the poster ads “must not appear in the form complained of” and directed Warner Bros. to keep future marketing likely to frighten young children away from places where they would see it.
The ruling cited BCAP Code rules 1.2, 4.1, 4.10, 5.1 and 32.3, and CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 1.3, 4.1 and 4.2.
The ASA rejected a separate complaint that the posters trivialized child loss or ongoing global conflicts, finding that text identifying the image as promotion for a film provided sufficient context, even if some viewers found it distasteful.
The campaign also included a TV ad and a matching Prime Video ad depicting a family receiving a call about a daughter who had gone missing eight years earlier, with the father questioning what she was doing in a 3000-year-old sarcophagus. On-screen text read, “Some Things Are Meant to Stay Buried.” Both ran with a post-7:30 p.m. scheduling restriction cleared by Clearcast.
The ASA found the TV and streaming ads were unlikely to cause serious distress and that their scheduling restrictions were sufficient to limit exposure to young children, rejecting complaints that they should have been kept off air later or targeted more precisely on Prime Video. It also noted Clearcast’s data showing an average children’s index of 31 across the TV placements – well below the industry baseline of 100 that represents typical child viewership, indicating the actual child audience was low. No further action was required for the TV and streaming ads.
“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” released in the U.K. on April 17 and grossed $2.9 million.
The Walt Disney Co. reported its fiscal Q3 earnings early Wednesday, with films like Toy Story 5, streaming, and its lucrative experiences division powering its results.
The company missed Wall Street expectations for revenue, but beat them in operating income and earnings per share, with stronger-than-expected theme park performance helping to bolster its bottom line.
The company also teed up some big changes coming to its divisions, teasing a plan to turn Disney+ into “a comprehensive membership ecosystem,” with the first elements of that vision rolling out early next year.
Meanwhile, the company’s lucrative consumer products segment will move from being part of Disney’s experiences division and into its entertainment division: “We believe this shift will have strategic and operational benefits by bringing the monetization of our IP through consumer products closer to the studios that create that IP,” the company writes.
Disney reported revenue of $25.2 billion, up 7 percent from a year ago, with segment operating income of $5.5 billion, up 21 percent from a year ago.
In entertainment, revenues were $11.3 billion with operating income of $1.68 billion. In streaming, SVOD entertainment revenue (Disney+ and Hulu minus ESPN) was $712 million, a sharp increase from a year ago, and a signal that streaming is becoming more reliably profitable.
The company did note that The Mandalorian and Grogu and the live action Moana “underperformed” at the box office, but argued that “these franchise investments contributed to value creation beyond their theatrical releases.” Toy Story, for example, has generated more than $16 billion for Disney as a franchise, it said.
In experiences, revenues were $10 billion, up 10% from a year ago, with operating income of $3 billion, up 20%. That was despite market concerns around theme parks, especially with Universal recently reporting lower than expected results. The company said that international visitors are still down at its park, but they made up for it with domestic attendance and annual passholders.
In sports, the NBA Finals helped power ESPN, with revenues of $4.5 billion, up 4 percent, though operating income fell 17 percent to $858 million due to higher NBA rights costs.
Disney also said that it would use the cash from the $1.2 billion sale of its A+E stake to do stock buybacks, and elaborated a bit on how it expects to use artificial intelligence:
“With AI, it isn’t simply about efficiency. We use it first and foremost to enhance a creative process that will always be human-centered, artist-driven, and creator-led,” the company writes. “We’ve cultivated the world’s richest portfolio of IP and production experience across a century of filmmaking, giving us an advantage that our peers and no new entrant can quickly replicate.”
EIP-8361 would deduct a rising share of validator rewards and destroy the ETH, cancelling issuance entirely at half the supply staked.
Its authors say the validator entry queue is adding 1.75 million ETH a month and that every month of delay costs 1.5 points of staking ratio.
Isidoros Passadis of Lido called the proposal too complicated to rush and warned it could price expert node operators out of the market.
Ethereum developers have submitted a proposal that would charge every validator a deduction on each duty it is assigned and burn the ETH, with the deduction rising as more of the supply is staked until it cancels staking rewards outright.
EIP-8361, a tapered issuance burn, sets a fixed saturation balance of 60.25 million ETH, roughly half the supply at the time of the fork. The burn fraction scales with the staking ratio raised to the power of 1.5, hitting 100% at that balance, at which point a validator performing its duties perfectly earns zero net consensus yield. The change touches only the consensus layer, and Prysm has a draft implementation running to about 300 lines.
Under the current curve, yield falls only with the square root of the staking ratio and keeps a floor near 1.5% however much ETH is staked, so stake flows in for as long as that floor clears the risk premium stakers demand. Removing it lets the market settle where yield meets that premium, which the authors argue is strictly below 50%.
Why now
Ethereum’s staking ratio passed a third of supply in April, and the validator entry queue is saturated at maximum churn, according to the proposal’s co-author Jérôme de Tychey. He argued that a worst case built on conservative assumptions puts more than 70 million ETH at stake by January 2028, north of 55% of supply, with every month of delay worth around 1.5 points of staking ratio. “The window is closing,” he wrote.
Around 33% of ETH is staked now, paying roughly 2.6%. Imposed at once the burn would cut that to 1.2%, so it phases in over an 18-month transition that temporarily doubles the base reward factor before decaying it back, which with fork lead time gives about two years to adjust. The taper’s shape applies from the first epoch after activation. Issuance would peak near a 20% ratio at about 0.5% of supply a year, then fall to zero at 50%.
The draft argues that stake beyond a certain level reduces security, concentrating supply with custodians and staking providers, weakening the credibility of social slashing and forcing out solo stakers, who pay income tax on nominal yield. It also holds that dilution taxes unstaked holders and lets liquid staking tokens displace raw ETH as the ecosystem’s working money.
Large operators are hit directly. Because issuance would fall past its peak, an operator that keeps growing claims a bigger share of a shrinking pot, and one holding half the stake would find growth stops paying once about 31% of supply is staked.
Lido pushes back
Isidoros Passadis, Chief of Staking at Lido, argued the proposal attempts too much at once, that its supporting research is “too theoretical,” and that it “lays Ethereum’s hard-fought uniqueness at the sacrificial altar of ETH as money.” He objected to the timing, saying issuance changes had been slated for a later fork.
I think that EIP 8361 tries to do too many things (increasing the moneyness of ETH, pre-empting remotely possible future decreases security due to overstake, protecting solo stakers, etc) at once and in my estimation will mostly do the opposite. I honestly believe that issuance… https://t.co/4qZPrPJy8s
Passadis warned the curve could produce a sustained equilibrium near 50% staked with zero nominal yield, which he called “a death-knell for the security of the network,” as operators prioritising expertise and decentralization are priced out by large, minimal-cost parties able to run at break-even. Capping staking only displaces the too-big-to-fail problem, he said, since yield-seeking ETH moves to riskier custodial venues.
De Tychey addressed that line of attack pre-emptively. “Nobody needs to protect solo stakers from this EIP,” he wrote, arguing they need protecting from a curve that raises dilution indefinitely with no off-switch.
Consensus issuance accounts for at least 93% of staking yield today, according to the proposal, which remains subject to the EIP inclusion process.
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