This is not necessarily true. Since ATOM gives one of the highest “risk-free” rates of yield, funds or large holders can stake and hedge their downside exposure, collecting one of the highest delta neutral spreads in the space. These actors likely don’t care about pricing downside for ATOM, as it only affects their yield and not their principal. So I personally agree that there’s likely a large subset of ATOM stakers staking for the yield. However one of the key reasons we’ve put out an RFP is to get the data we need to confirm or deny this, and to see how large that userbase is.
I also strongly agree with this, and would take it a step further to say that if we have a large userbase of ATOM holders that are delta neutral and collecting the spread, those users will leave anyway after they’ve devalued their yield by selling ATOM staking rewards and can find a better hedged opportunity elsewhere. So while we do want to take these users into account and try to find a happy medium that keeps as many of them engaged as we can, we can’t build an entire strategy around trying to prevent them from selling ATOM, because that’s an inevitability as long as ATOM is in decline.