Staked ether cleared 41.5 million coins this week for the first time. That is more than a third of all the ether in existence, locked up and earning a yield.

The climb has not broken stride all year. Half a million more coins locked in the past fortnight, roughly five million since January. If you hold ETH, this has been the comfortable story underneath everything else: whatever the price does, the amount left to buy keeps shrinking.

So it should stop you for a second that the people who build Ethereum spent this week arguing about how to make it stop.

The proposal is called EIP-8363. It would keep calculating staking rewards exactly the way they are calculated today, then burn a growing slice of them as more ether gets staked. If staking ever reaches half the supply, the burn reaches everything. No new ether would be issued at all, and the operators running the network would earn only what users pay to transact.

The reasoning is simple enough. Under today's rules there is no point at which staking stops being worth it, so the locked share just keeps rising. Follow that far enough and most of the supply ends up parked with a handful of large staking companies. Everyone who does not stake pays for it, in new coins issued to somebody else, forever.

The people with the most money on the line hate it. Stani Kulechov, the founder of the lending protocol Aave, argues the burn would make the yield unpredictable for exactly the institutional buyers everyone spent the last two years courting. "Ethereum should not be punished for its growth," he wrote. The founder of ether.fi, a leading restaking protocol, is on the same side of the argument.

Their objection is the most revealing sentence in the whole fight. The case against capping the yield is that too much now depends on it: staking yield has become the interest rate the rest of on-chain finance is priced against. Lending rates key off it. The wrapped staking tokens threaded through DeFi are built on it. Change the yield and you change the maths for everyone who touched ether because it pays.

Whether the proposal lives or dies, the fight has already told you something about your ether that the supply charts never will.