Vitalik Buterin’s plan of an April Fool’s Day prank was penning down a proposal which could help lay down the foundation to resolve one of the biggest questions about Ethereum—whether the amount of ether could ever have a limit set to it.

The Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP), penned down on 1st April, stated that there should be a cap on the cryptocurrency and that the cap on the cryptocurrency should be of 120 million—120,204,432 to be precise (2x the amount of ether sold originally in its sale back in 2014). The news of the cap sent the whole internet buzzing before the Ethereum cofounder admitted that the proposal was just a joke.

While he admitted that the proposal was just a joke, Buterin claims that the idea is pretty much real. Buterin later tweeted on Monday, “The proposal is very real in the sense that the words actually were written in the github issue, and the arguments for it are real arguments”.

Bitcoin has a 21 million lifetime cap, as per the stern protocol (did you check out our post on Intel’s latest Bitcoin mining chip accelerator which reduces the energy consumption by 35 percent?) If Ethereum community embraces the proposal, it would, in a lot of ways, follow the footsteps of Bitcoin.

The Ethereum market is highly unstable these days. With the market cap falling down to $300 billion, the new call for change can help Ethereum stop itself from plummeting further below. A cap would be the first step towards getting it back on track.

Prior to admitting that the announcement was a joke, Buterin tweeted that even if EIP is adopted a little too late, it is pretty much possible to set a much higher max cap on Ethereum. So there is a possibility that even after reaching 120 million, the number of ethers circulating in the market can be shot up to 140 million.

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