Even though any sort of cryptocurrency-related announcement made on April 1 needs to be taken with a grain of salt, not everything can be dismissed easily. According to GitHub, Vitalik Buterin is actively contemplating limiting the Ethereum coin supply at some point. That would be an intriguing development that a lot of community members have been asking for.
The Ethereum Supply Cap is in Question
As of right now, Ethereum still does not have a maximum supply of coins. While this has been somewhat of a problem in the past, it seems most people have stopped caring about it much. With the inevitable switch to proof-of-stake at some point in the near future, an inflationary Ethereum ecosystem may not necessarily be a bad thing, all things considered.
Even so, there is an interesting discussion taking place on GitHub right now. Surprisingly, it was started by Vitalik Buterin himself, who is seemingly interested in capping the maximum Ethereum supply in the near future. Doing so will certainly require some big changes in the code, although it remains to be seen if this change will ever go into effect.
According to the proposal, the supply may need to be capped at 120 million ETH, though this number may still be subject to change in the near future. It is a very interesting number regardless, and it would make it somewhat easier to plan.
With a current Ethereum supply of just over 98.5 million ETH, it seems such a hard cap will be met quite quickly. It would also mean the total supply would be capped at twice the number of tokens sold during the initial sale of Ether. It is uncanny how far this currency has come in the past few years, and how things may evolve in the near future. A hard cap for Ethereum would certainly introduce some big changes which have both advantages and drawbacks.
The big question is whether or not this proposal should be taken seriously. Given the rather strange timing of sharing this information, it is only normal that a lot of people think of it as an April Fool’s joke. Even so, the topic of introducing an Ethereum hard cap is something the developers may want to explore regardless. Especially with the upcoming switch to PoS, rewards will decrease significantly and initializing an “end point” seems more than warranted.
It will be quite interesting to see how this development plays out. Introducing an Ethereum hard supply cap seems to be counterproductive in light of what Buterin envisioned when Ethereum was first created. At the same time, a cap would become a sign of network maturity that the general public could understand.
