Maybe, rewards for soft staking could be reduced, and at the same time locked staking with higher rewards could be introduced to have the desired effect with lower deflation.
I am sure everyone agrees on the benefits of soft staking. It’s a good incentive for the investors to stay in MP, it creates a positive social perception and also sometimes results in free advertisement (coming on top of staking lists). Yet, it comes with some disadvantages as well. The most obvious is, soft staking doesn’t convince the market participants that the staked supply will remain still if the price surges. Therefore, high staking rate might be looking like a masquerade ball to some. This alone is repressing the token price quite a lot, imho.
Should MP introduce locked staking with supercharged rewards (nothing extra in reality), I bet a big portion of the existing investors would take that deal (just like the ETH staking craze) as the community truly believes in the future of MP. This would reduce the de facto circulating supply immensely and give confidence to the market. Those who choose to continue with soft staking would get the reduced rewards and at the end the inflation rate of MP would be pulled down in real numbers as well.
If I am not completely mistaken, market participants really like projects where some of the once-freely-circulating supply is being locked (not the early investors’ and team members’ locked tokens) by their holders purely for their faith in the project. It creates a strong conviction and leads to more adoption.