StarkWare CEO proposes 4% Bitcoin inflation rate

• StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson proposed replacing Bitcoin's 21 million supply cap with a fixed 4% annual issuance rate.
• The proposal drew criticism from Bitcoin supporters, who argued the fixed supply is central to Bitcoin's value proposition.
• Ben-Sasson said the change would address the long-term loss of Bitcoin caused by inaccessible private keys.

StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson proposed replacing Bitcoin's (CRYPTO:BTC) fixed 21 million coin supply cap with a 4% annual issuance rate, arguing that permanently lost private keys will reduce the amount of usable Bitcoin over time.

Ben-Sasson said the proposal would retain a long-term supply limit while offsetting lost coins, citing estimates that as many as 4 million Bitcoin have already become permanently inaccessible, although the suggestion differs from Bitcoin's longstanding fixed-supply design.

“The current 21 million cap doesn't make sense because private keys are lost over time,” said StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson.

Ben-Sasson said a fixed 4% annual issuance rate would broadly track global population growth, while critics argued that Bitcoin's divisibility into 2.1 quadrillion satoshis and its fixed supply already support long-term scarcity without changing the protocol.

The proposal has not been adopted, and any modification to Bitcoin's monetary policy would require broad agreement among developers, miners and node operators, making such a change difficult to implement.

Some members of the cryptocurrency community pointed to a proposal under consideration by Zcash (CRYPTO:ZEC) that would gradually reissue voluntarily burned coins as mining rewards while maintaining the network's fixed 21 million token supply.

Bitcoin's fixed supply cap remains one of its defining features, with supporters arguing that lost coins increase scarcity, while figures including Strategy chairman Michael Saylor have publicly supported permanently removing coins from circulation by never passing on access to their holdings.

At the time of reporting, Bitcoin price was $62,592.04.