Stellar Wants to Remove Inflation Since It No Longer ‘Serves Its Purpose’

Cryptocurrency protocol Stellar (XLM) announced that it intends to remove its inflation feature in an upcoming upgrade.

According to the Stellar Development Foundation’s (SDF) blog post published on Sept. 30, developers are keen to discard the inflation tool, which they say now offers little functionality to network participants. 

Users to vote on inflation removal

Per the blog post, the protocol’s new incarnation, version 12, should no longer include it, with a vote aiming to achieve consensus. The post reads:

“After listening to what everyone had to say and weighing the pros and cons, here’s what the SDF is asking validators to consider: we think it’s a good idea to disable the current inflation mechanism. We’ve implemented a change in version 12 of Stellar core that would do just that, and we encourage validators to vote to accept it.”

Network validators will have until Oct. 28 to install the new version 12, at which point developers will analyze the results.

Inflation funds fail to reach their intended goal

Stellar originally included the inflation tool in order for projects to gain extra funds from community payouts. Since 2014, however, the situation changed and the original plan saw no real-world success. The SDF adds:

“Five years and several million accounts later, it’s clear that inflation doesn’t serve this purpose. Rather than sending inflation to projects building on Stellar, the majority of users join pools in order to claim that inflation for themselves — if they set their inflation destination at all.”

Should the proposal to remove inflation fail, version 13 of the Stellar protocol — being itself a subject of a community-wide vote — will reinclude it.

XLM’s price appeared ambivalent to the concept at press time, gaining modestly as part of a wider cryptocurrency resurgence on Tuesday.

As Cointelegraph reported on Sept. 9, Stellar confirmed a $120 million airdrop in conjunction with encrypted messenger Keybase.