Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argued in November 2026 that ETH’s value should rest on its role as a store of value rather than on transaction fees being burned—a shift away from the network’s familiar “ultrasound money” narrative.
In a November 8 post cited by Decrypt, Buterin said Ethereum’s decentralization, censorship resistance and security mattered more than whether fee burning offset new issuance.
“We should not feel sad if fee burn is < 10% of breakeven indefinitely; the value of ETH comes from elsewhere,” he wrote.
Why the fee-burning narrative is under scrutiny
Ethereum began burning a portion of transaction fees in 2021. The “ultrasound money” argument held that greater network use would remove more ETH from circulation, potentially supporting its price through scarcity. Supporters also compared fee revenue to the earnings underpinning a company’s shares.
Buterin challenged that comparison. Although Ethereum burned millions of ETH annually from 2021 to 2023, he said those burns were “never a true floor,” with much of the activity coming from crypto-native uses such as lending and NFT purchases.
Connor Howe, co-founder and CEO of infrastructure provider Enso, told Decrypt that Ethereum’s layer-2 expansion had further weakened the argument. A significant share of activity had moved to those networks, he said, where users pay “almost nothing” to settle transactions. Optimizing ETH for fee burning would also mean favoring higher gas prices—an outcome users do not want.
Buterin said optimizing fee revenue to justify ETH’s roughly $270 billion market capitalization at the time would effectively turn Ethereum into a “world-scale major corporation,” undermining decentralization.
The alternative pitch—and what remains unproven
Binji Pande, a founding member of Ethlabs, endorsed the store-of-value framing. Speaking to Decrypt, he pointed to Ethereum’s censorship resistance, distribution, availability and role in tokenization, stablecoins and decentralized finance.
Pande went further, arguing that ETH was a more “future-proof” store of value than Bitcoin or gold. He cited gold’s physical storage and portability limits and raised concerns about Bitcoin’s preparedness for AI and quantum-computing threats. Those are comparative claims from an Ethereum ecosystem participant, not established proof that ETH will preserve value better than either asset.
Decrypt reported that the Ethereum Foundation had formed a dedicated post-quantum team in January 2026 and that researchers had also debated potential AI-powered threats. The report described Bitcoin’s community as more divided over how to address quantum risk.
Ethlabs co-founder Julian Ma argued that Ethereum’s security work and investment in formal verification strengthened its store-of-value case. Pande also said the Ethereum Foundation owned less than 0.2% of ETH and that the token’s 11-year trading history supported his distribution argument. He contended that newer assets would struggle to achieve similarly credible distribution without becoming centralized.
These arguments explain the proposed narrative shift; they do not demonstrate that ETH will hold its purchasing power over time or outperform competing assets.
Howe supported Buterin’s position but criticized how long it had taken to articulate it. He also said the Ethereum Foundation needed to pay closer attention to applications building on its network.
Original source: Decrypt, published November 10, 2026, at 01:14:10 UTC+08:00. This article reflects that reporting period.