On August 7, Grayscale started paying staking yield to shareholders as cash. Its Ethereum and Solana funds now sweep the rewards those tokens earn and hand them out as a quarterly distribution, the closest thing crypto has produced to a dividend. The timing is the problem. In the same window, both networks put forward changes that would shrink the very staking yield the new product is built to pass along.
Solana would halve its staking yield in three years
Start with Solana, because its proposal is the further along. SIMD-0550 would double the network's annual disinflation rate from 15% to 30%. In plain terms, new SOL would stop being minted twice as fast, and the reward for staking would fall with it.
The modeled path is steep. Staking yield sits near 5.84% today. Under the proposal it drops to about 4.34% after the first year, 3.00% after the second, and 2.25% after the third. A holder who stakes through all three years would compound roughly 9.89%, against about 13.15% on the current schedule. The authors estimate the change removes around 18.9 million SOL from future issuance over six years, a figure their model prices near $1.47 billion. SOL trades around $75 now, so the real number moves with the market.
There is a cost buried in the validator math. The proposal's own modeling pushes 2 validators below break-even in year one, 13 in year two, and 30 in year three, as thinner rewards stop covering the price of running a node. That tension has surfaced before, when an earlier Solana proposal aimed to burn far more of the network's daily supply. Concentration is the other backdrop. A single provider recently held about 27% of all staked SOL, so who keeps validating matters as much as the headline yield.
Ethereum's answer is a burn, not a cut
Ethereum is earlier and blunter. EIP-8363, filed in draft in early August, would burn a rising share of validator issuance as more of the supply gets staked, reaching a point where 100% of that reward is destroyed once roughly half of all ETH is locked in staking. The authors frame it as a brake on growth rather than a haircut on income, though the effect on staking yield is the same. Their warning is that, left alone, validator entry could push staking past 70 million ETH, more than 55% of supply, by January 2028. One estimate tied to the draft puts the reward cut near 54%.
| Proposal | Network | Mechanism | Current yield | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SIMD-0550 | Solana | Doubles disinflation 15% to 30% | 5.84% | Under vote |
| EIP-8363 | Ethereum | Burns issuance as staking ratio climbs | Variable | Draft |
Neither chain is acting on a whim. Both are trying to slow the drift of supply into staking, where locked tokens earn but do little else. Ethereum's staking yield has already trailed short-term Treasuries for stretches, a gap laid out when the staking queue ran 42 days long while the Fed paid more.
The ETF buyer is caught in the middle
Here the two moves collide with the product Grayscale just shipped. An ETF holder who came in for a packaged staking yield now owns a claim on a payout the protocol is drafting rules to reduce. Grayscale reached this design after a rough run at altcoin products, having pulled three altcoin ETFs days before the rules changed. The staking-dividend structure launched anyway. Whether the staking yield behind it holds at anything like today's rate now sits with two sets of governance voters, not with the fund.
