Dynamic inflation

Since this was proposed for MIP and heavily discussed, I wanted to give an opinion as the president of Massa Labs,the software development company behind the Massa node.

Massa Labs staking transparency

As of April 22nd, 2025, Massa labs is staking with the following accounts:

  • AU12Vi9V6Fsq9HMh9ge88WJ5cgymBGc3oUX2F6WpRqA5HdabPcPt5 => 81,101 Rolls
  • AU128Rexxftc1jYhyouTesxjPqeezEHh5LUAzNaAfqDo1dWRgPH8m => 10,000 Rolls
  • AU12L4gaQ8j8j5yBt2jSmcsmu51yZW2gLjnZr5rAWnjKJDNacR3jp => 42,263 Rolls

Total: 7% of the active total stake at the time.

Position

Technical assessment

Technically speaking, the proposal is sound.
The incentive to create blocks when no operations are available is preserved.
The incentive to fill blocks with as many operations as possible, and the operation fee market at saturation are both preserved.
The values are within secure bounds.
The proposal increases the security against block producers flooding their own blocks, using burns.

Alignment with our goals

We believe this proposal aligns with our goals as it sustains token value at high activity without penalizing node runners at low activity.

As a word of warning, we do observe certain issues linked to deflation:

  • burning part of the operation fees will decrease staker revenue at medium activity
  • burning part of the operation fees might increase operation fees for users at high activity
  • the total available storage space will decrease over time, which might hurt deweb storage availability for new users in the long run
  • the total number of available rolls will decrease (as 1 roll is always 100 MAS), potentially leading to centralization issues in the long run
  • if deflation causes the price of MAS to go up, the cost of deferred calls would go up because deferred calls have a minimal fixed MAS cost per unit of gas. This will make the feature less attractive.
  • if deflation causes the price of MAS to go up, storage costs will go up because storage space has a fixed cost per byte. This will make deweb less competitive.
  • if deflation causes the price of MAS to go up, the staking entry barrier of 100 MAS would incur higher costs for new stakers and might hurt decentralization. This would make staking less accessible and attractive.

However, we believe those effects are minimal in the foreseeable future given the remaining token unlocks and reasonable expectations on block load in the short term, thus giving us time to come up with better de-correlated pricing schemes for operation fees, storage costs, deferred calls fees, and rolls costs, all while better protecting token value in the meantime.

Vote

Massa Labs will vote in favor of the proposal.

1 Like

I’m also in favor of this proposal. I think we will need to take a different token approach for DeWeb storage. Being linked to $MAS value means that any business model leveraging Massa DeWeb most compensate for this flutuation of cost into their costing model to clients. In the other hand, if a storage token was created for storage pricing and following a smother curve of the Massa value (such as a Moving Average), this would help users to adjust to price volatility. I’ll create a proposal for this specific.

Hello!
With the Foundation we will vote no for the following reasons:

  • it would not change anything in practice until we reach ~1 million tx per day, while it would book developer time that we can use for things with more impact,
  • it’s not 100% clear why we should have less inflation when activity is growing, while more tokens are needed for storage costs etc as you pointed out Damir also with other good warning points

Though, happy to study it in more detail when we reach this 1 million tx/day !