Staking Inflation Reforms Trap Ethereum and Solana in Centralization Dilemma

The tension here is structural, not cyclical: staking rewards double as both validator compensation and a DeFi yield primitive, so any reform to issuance cuts against one constituency or the other. The asymmetry matters most — small operators bear the fixed costs of running a node, so reward reductions hit them harder than institutional stakers with scale and other revenue. That makes decentralization a function of the reward schedule itself, not just the validator count. Whether either chain can decouple validator economics from token issuance without hollowing out its staking base is the open question.