Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is urging the community to focus on ETH as a store of value rather than as a fee-burning token, arguing that Ethereum’s burn mechanism was “never a true floor” for the asset’s value.

The position marks a shift in messaging from the Ethereum community, which began describing ETH as “ultrasound money” — a play on Bitcoin’s “sound money” label — in 2021 after the network started burning a portion of every transaction fee. The burn was introduced through the August 2021 London upgrade, which removes each transaction’s base fee from circulation rather than paying it out. The argument was that increased use of Ethereum would reduce the number of coins in circulation, potentially supporting a higher price.

Buterin now says that dynamic is less important than ETH’s value as a stable, decentralized and censorship-resistant asset with strong security.

“We should not feel sad if fee burn is < 10% of breakeven indefinitely; the value of ETH comes from elsewhere,” Buterin tweeted on Sunday, November 8, 2026. The “breakeven” he referenced is the point at which fee burn would fully offset the network’s new ETH issuance — the threshold at which total supply would stop growing.

Buterin’s post on X said:

Expanding on why I believe "ETH as store of value (SoV)" makes much more sense to focus on than "ETH as fee-burning token". Three primary reasons: 1. ETH as fee-burning token never was as strong as it seemed 2. Optimizing for ETH as fee-burning token would demand Ethereum and… — vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 8, 2026

https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2119401255919604064?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Supporters of Ethereum’s fee-burning structure argued that transaction fees provided ETH with a price floor, similar to the way a company’s stock may be supported by revenue and profits. Ethereum burned millions of ETH annually from 2021 to 2023, but Buterin said that activity was “never a true floor.”

He argued that most of the burns came from internal crypto activity, including lending and what he called “silly NFT purchases.”

The expansion of Ethereum’s layer-2 networks has also weakened the fee-burning argument, according to Connor Howe, co-founder and CEO of infrastructure provider Enso. Howe told Decrypt that a significant share of activity has moved to layer-2 networks, where users pay “almost nothing” to settle transactions. The dynamic underscores a trade-off at the heart of Ethereum’s scaling strategy: layer-2 networks lower costs for users, but they also shift transactions away from the mainnet, where fee burn is generated.

To optimize Ethereum as a fee-burning token, Howe added, the network would need to optimize for higher gas prices—an outcome that users do not want.

“If we decide we actually want to optimize ETH for burning fees to justify a present-day ~$270B market cap, then Ethereum would essentially be functioning as a world-scale major corporation,” Buterin said. He argued that such a model would undermine one of Ethereum’s main selling points: decentralization.

Binji Pande, a founding member of Ethlabs, told Decrypt that he agreed with Buterin and believed ETH was a more “future-proof store of value” than Bitcoin. Pande cited Ethereum’s censorship resistance, its “great distribution,” its broad availability and its role in sectors including tokenization, Stablecoins and decentralized finance, or DeFi.

Ethereum as a store of value

A store of value is an asset intended to retain its worth over time, allowing people to hold wealth without expecting it to disappear. Gold has historically been viewed as the ultimate store of value, while Bitcoin supporters have promoted the cryptocurrency as “digital gold.”

Pande argued that both assets have limitations compared with Ethereum. Gold, he said, lacks the portability needed in a more globalized world, while storing large amounts of the metal eventually reaches physical limits.

“Gold has held the SoV role for a long time, but given the world we live in now is much more globalized, we need increased portability, something gold simply cannot offer,” Pande told Decrypt. “Storing gold is simply not useful either past a certain point; you reach physical limits.”

Pande also questioned whether Bitcoin is sufficiently “future-proof” in light of potential threats from artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Ethereum has been preparing for those risks, he said. In January, the Ethereum Foundation formed a dedicated post-quantum team, and researchers have more recently debated potential AI-powered threats. By comparison, Pande said, the Bitcoin community appears more divided over how to address quantum risks.

“Security is ingrained more deeply into Ethereum’s culture than anywhere else,” Julian Ma, co-founder of Ethlabs, told Decrypt. “AI being used for cyberattacks and potentially breaking cryptography strengthens ETH's position as a programmable store-of-value asset because the years of preparation and large investments into security and formal verification of the Ethereum protocol and its applications are about to pay off.”

Pande further argued that newer assets cannot compete with ETH as a store of value because their distribution cannot be verified as fairly distributed. He said the Ethereum Foundation owns less than 0.2% of ETH and that the token has traded for 11 years.

“Trying to distribute or mine a new asset as a SoV in the lord’s 2026 is like trying to hide a sack of meat in a sea of piranhas,” Pande said. “It can and WILL get centralized.”

Howe said Ethereum’s leadership had not necessarily reached this position quickly enough. He said the Ethereum Foundation “needs to start to actually listen and look at the applications building on top of their network.”

“I think he is right,” Howe said of Buterin’s recent post. “And I think it took too long to say it.”

How widely the broader Ethereum community adopts the store-of-value framing — and whether it reshapes future debates over fee markets and the scaling roadmap — remains to be seen.

Source: Decrypt