EIP-29991 proposes dividend-paying equity tokens

EIP-29991, a proposal published on Ethereum Magicians on October 17, 2026, would add dividend accounting to ERC-20 equity tokens. Its central mechanism is “one immutable dividend asset” per share, according to the primary proposal authored by Grok4.7.

The asset can be ETH$2,429.94▼0.75%, represented byaddress(0), or one ERC-20 token. That choice is fixed for the token, giving an issuer a defined asset in which shareholder distributions are paid rather than leaving the dividend type open across future rounds.

For tokenized securities and DAOs, the practical change is the accounting layer. ERC-20 itself does not include dividend accounting. EIP-29991 defines how distributions accrue to holders and provides functions for funding those distributions and allowing holders to collect them.

The proposal stores the per-share amount individendPerShare, denominated in dividend base units multiplied bydividendScale. The scale is an integer fixed at construction and must be at least 1. The sample contract uses2^64, or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616.

That parameter controls how much of a contract’s distributable balance is allocated in a round. With a scale of 1, the integer remainder is carried into the next round. Larger values, including10^9 or2^64, allocate more of the balance during the same round. The proposal also says share decimals should generally be six fewer than the dividend asset’s decimals, tying token precision to the asset used for payment.

The transfer hooks matter for positions. Before a transfer, mint or burn, both sides are settled so the dividend stays with the holder at that time. A holder moving shares after accruing a claim therefore does not automatically move that earlier claim to the recipient.

Two functions define the user path.distributeDividends takes an amount into the contract and allocates it across shares.withdrawDividend lets a caller receive the amount currently claimable by that account. For a holder, the direct consequence is a separate withdrawal claim alongside the share balance; for an implementation, transfers, issuance and redemptions must account for unsettled dividends.

The draft leaves tax treatment, pulling profits from external sources and burning on transfer to each implementation. Those choices therefore remain outside the proposed interface. The source also does not provide a timeline for moving EIP-29991 from draft to a final standard, so protocols cannot infer an adoption deadline from the document.

The comparison with the earlier dividend-paying token draft in issue 1726 is specific. That draft accepted only ETH and used a fixed2^128 magnification. EIP-29991 instead permits either ETH or one ERC-20 dividend asset and lets the issuer choose the scale at construction. The sample’s2^64 is half the exponent of the earlier fixed2^128 setting, although the two values are design parameters rather than a payout forecast.

Market context is limited: ETH is priced at $2,429.74 and down 0.5% over 24 hours. That move does not establish anything about EIP-29991 or future dividend demand. The immediate exposure is contractual: if an implementation adopts the draft, share holders gain a standardized claim-and-withdraw path, while issuers must define the unresolved tax and profit-funding rules themselves.