ETHFI · a token that cannot mint, a buyback that removes nothing, and a count that ran past its own ceiling.

ETHFI cannot be created. Every one of the billion was made at launch in 2024, and the live token code has no instruction that makes more — no mint of any shape, no owner, and no upgrade path to add one later. The chain read the same 998,535,999 ETHFI at the start and the end of the window and at seven checkpoints in between.

One grant is still releasing: the core-contributor allocation, which drips about 145,128 ETHFI a day with no cliff and finishes on Mar 14 2027. It moved from 172,758,062 released at the start of the window to 185,819,565 now, leaving 28,880,435 still to come. Every other bucket — investors, airdrops, treasury, liquidity — reached its final figure before this window opened, the investor block on Mar 18 2026.

The four published ecosystem-fund wallets sent out 2,007,000 ETHFI, but only part of it reached the market: 2,000,000 went on Jun 17 2026 to a grants safe one hop short of holders, and that safe has paid 1,229,017 ETHFI to individual wallets in seven dated batches — May 29, Jun 5, Jul 1, Jul 17, Jul 22, Aug 6 and Aug 14 2026 — while still holding 1,042,252 undrawn. Another 7,000 was sold on Jul 17 2026. We count what actually landed. The tracked overhang behind it is large: 187,830,646 ETHFI across those four wallets, of which 173,200,600 sits in one wallet that has not moved a token in over a year, plus the 1,042,252 still inside the grants safe.

There is no bankruptcy estate, no trustee, no court-ordered distribution and no long-term locked tranche attached to ETHFI. Nothing here can fire.

The buyback is real — weekly from withdrawal-fee revenue, monthly from the wider business, widened again on Aug 13 2026 to every product line, with up to $50M of treasury money armed while the price sits under $3. It removes nothing. Bought ETHFI is handed to stakers rather than destroyed, and staked ETHFI is already counted as tradable: the counted supply is 1,018,168,558 against a 1,000,000,000 ceiling, so there is no uncounted pocket for the coins to move into. We measured the flow anyway, by the staking contract's value per share rather than its balance — it rose 1.209704 to 1.223071, about 1.2M ETHFI passed to stakers over the window, and roughly 545,000 of it in the 13 days since Aug 13 2026.

Nothing was destroyed. Total supply was identical at both ends of the window, and the dead address held the same 0.66 ETHFI throughout. ETHFI has been burned exactly once — 1,464,001 tokens on Aug 8 2025, which is why the outstanding total is 998,535,999 rather than a round billion. The code can burn, so this row is a live reading rather than an impossibility, and it is the row that would flip if any part of the buyback were ever pointed at a dead address.

No project wallet bought ETHFI. The two largest ecosystem-fund wallets held exactly the same balance at both ends of the window and the other two only sent, so the fund shrank rather than grew. There is also no accumulation address to watch, because repurchased coins are paid straight out instead of being held.

Staking looks like a lock and is not one. The receipt handed back for staked ETHFI moves freely between wallets — we counted 206 wallet-to-wallet transfers of it in a five-day sample — and the staked balance is already inside the counted supply, so nothing leaves the market. The contract did take in 7,553,728 more ETHFI over the window, but reading its value per share shows almost all of that is new deposits rather than anything removed.