Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argued on November 8, 2026, that ETH’s investment narrative should focus less on transaction-fee burns and more on its role as a store of value. His case centered on Ethereum’s decentralization, censorship resistance and security—not a claim that ETH’s market price is stable.
Decrypt reported the comments in an article published on November 10, 2026, at 01:14:10 UTC+08:00. The discussion marked a shift from the “ultrasound money” messaging that followed Ethereum’s introduction of transaction-fee burning in 2021.
Why Buterin is challenging the fee-burn thesis
The original argument was straightforward: greater Ethereum usage would burn more ETH, reducing circulating supply and supporting a higher price. Supporters also treated transaction fees as a potential valuation floor, drawing comparisons with corporate revenue and profits.
Buterin disputed how strong that foundation had ever been. Although Ethereum burned millions of ETH annually from 2021 through 2023, he said the burns were “never a true floor.” Much of the activity generating them came from uses within crypto, including lending and NFT purchases, he argued.
“We should not feel sad if fee burn is < 10% of breakeven indefinitely; the value of ETH comes from elsewhere,” Buterin wrote.
Connor Howe, co-founder and CEO of infrastructure provider Enso, told Decrypt that Ethereum’s expansion through layer-2 networks had further weakened the fee-burning argument. A significant share of activity had moved to those networks, he said, where users paid “almost nothing” to settle transactions.
That creates a tension: maximizing burns would favor higher gas prices, while users want cheaper transactions.
Buterin said optimizing fee revenue to justify ETH’s roughly $270 billion market capitalization at the time would effectively require Ethereum to operate as a major corporation on a global scale. In his view, that would compromise decentralization—one of the network’s core selling points.
The alternative case: a resilient store of value
Binji Pande, a founding member of Ethlabs, agreed with Buterin and described ETH to Decrypt as a more “future-proof store of value” than Bitcoin. That was Pande’s assessment, not an established finding.
He pointed to Ethereum’s censorship resistance, token distribution, availability and position in tokenization, stablecoins and decentralized finance. Pande also said the Ethereum Foundation owned less than 0.2% of ETH and that the token had traded for 11 years, contrasting that history with the difficulty of distributing a new asset without centralization.
His comparisons extended to gold and Bitcoin. Gold, he argued, faces physical storage and portability limits. For Bitcoin, he raised concerns about preparedness for potential AI and quantum-computing threats.
Decrypt reported that the Ethereum Foundation had established a dedicated post-quantum team in January 2026 and that researchers had subsequently debated potential AI-powered threats. The report described Bitcoin’s community as more divided over its response to quantum risks.
Ethlabs co-founder Julian Ma argued that Ethereum’s investment in security and formal verification strengthened its potential as a programmable store of value. Those comments expressed expectations about preparedness, rather than proof that future threats had been resolved.
A valuation debate, not evidence of a rally
The reported shift concerns how ETH’s value is explained: less emphasis on supply reduction through fees, more on the durability and usefulness of the underlying network. The article supplied no price move or fund-flow evidence demonstrating a market response.
Howe supported Buterin’s position but criticized its timing. He said the Ethereum Foundation needed to listen more closely to applications building on the network, adding: “I think he is right, and I think it took too long to say it.”
