Currency And Issuance

The Ethereum network includes its own built-in currency, ether, which serves the dual purpose of providing a primary liquidity layer to allow for efficient exchange between various types of digital assets and, more importantly, of providing a mechanism for paying transaction fees. For convenience and to avoid future argument (see the current mBTC/uBTC/satoshi debate in Bitcoin), the denominations will be pre-labeled:

• 1: wei
• 1012: szabo
• 1015: finney
• 1018: ether

This should be taken as an expanded version of the concept of “dollars” and “cents” or “BTC” and “satoshi”. In the near future, we expect “ether” to be used for ordinary transactions, “finney” for microtransactions and “szabo” and “wei” for technical discussions around fees and protocol implementation; the remaining denominations may become useful later and should not be included in clients at this point.

The issuance model will be as follows:

• Ether will be released in a currency sale at the price of 1000-2000 ether per BTC, a mechanism intended to fund the Ethereum organization and pay for development that has been used with success by other platforms such as Mastercoin and NXT. Earlier buyers will benefit from larger discounts. The BTC received from the sale will be used entirely to pay salaries and bounties to developers and invested into various for-profit and non-profit projects in the Ethereum and cryptocurrency ecosystem.
• 0.099x the total amount sold (60102216 ETH) will be allocated to the organization to compensate early contributors and pay ETH-denominated expenses before the genesis block.
• 0.099x the total amount sold will be maintained as a long-term reserve.
• 0.26x the total amount sold will be allocated to miners per year forever after that point.

Long-Term Supply Growth Rate (percent)

Despite the linear currency issuance, just like with Bitcoin over time the supply growth rate nevertheless tends to zero

The two main choices in the above model are (1) the existence and size of an endowment pool, and (2) the existence of a permanently growing linear supply, as opposed to a capped supply as in Bitcoin. The justification of the endowment pool is as follows. If the endowment pool did not exist, and the linear issuance reduced to 0.217x to provide the same inflation rate, then the total quantity of ether would be 16.5% less and so each unit would be 19.8% more valuable. Hence, in the equilibrium 19.8% more ether would be purchased in the sale, so each unit would once again be exactly as valuable as before. The organization would also then have 1.198x as much BTC, which can be considered to be split into two slices: the original BTC, and the additional 0.198x. Hence, this situation is exactly equivalent to the endowment, but with one important difference: the organization holds purely BTC, and so is not incentivized to support the value of the ether unit.

The permanent linear supply growth model reduces the risk of what some see as excessive wealth concentration in Bitcoin, and gives individuals living in present and future eras a fair chance to acquire currency units, while at the same time retaining a strong incentive to obtain and hold ether because the “supply growth rate” as a percentage still tends to zero over time. We also theorize that because coins are always lost over time due to carelessness, death, etc, and coin loss can be modeled as a percentage of the total supply per year, that the total currency supply in circulation will in fact eventually stabilize at a value equal to the annual issuance divided by the loss rate (eg. at a loss rate of 1%, once the supply reaches 26X then 0.26X will be mined and 0.26X lost every year, creating an equilibrium).

Note that in the future, it is likely that Ethereum will switch to a proof-of-stake model for security, reducing the issuance requirement to somewhere between zero and 0.05X per year. In the event that the Ethereum organization loses funding or for any other reason disappears, we leave open a “social contract”: anyone has the right to create a future candidate version of Ethereum, with the only condition being that the quantity of ether must be at most equal to 60102216 * (1.198 + 0.26 * n) where n is the number of years after the genesis block. Creators are free to crowd-sell or otherwise assign some or all of the difference between the PoS-driven supply expansion and the maximum allowable supply expansion to pay for development. Candidate upgrades that do not comply with the social contract may justifiably be forked into compliant versions.