Originally reported by Decrypt on November 10, 2026, at 01:14:10 UTC+08:00.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argued that ETH’s investment narrative should focus less on transaction-fee burning and more on its potential role as a store of value. His case centers on Ethereum’s decentralization, censorship resistance and security—not on a promise that reduced token supply will drive higher prices.
In comments posted on November 8, 2026, Buterin said the fee-burning thesis “never was as strong as it seemed.” The shift raises an economic question for Ethereum: whether maximizing token destruction is compatible with making the network inexpensive and broadly useful.
Why fee burning is not a guaranteed price floor
Ethereum began burning a portion of transaction fees in 2021. The “ultrasound money” narrative linked network usage to token scarcity: more activity would burn more ETH, potentially reducing circulating supply. Supporters argued that this mechanism could underpin ETH’s valuation, somewhat like revenue and profits support a company’s shares.
Decrypt reported that Ethereum burned millions of ETH annually from 2021 through 2023. But Buterin said those burns were “never a true floor,” noting that much of the activity came from crypto-native uses such as lending and NFT purchases.
“We should not feel sad if fee burn is < 10% of breakeven indefinitely; the value of ETH comes from elsewhere,” he wrote.
That argument separates ETH’s proposed value proposition from the expectation that transaction demand must generate enough burning to offset issuance.
Layer-2 growth exposes an incentive trade-off
Connor Howe, co-founder and CEO of infrastructure provider Enso, told Decrypt that Ethereum’s layer-2 expansion had further weakened the fee-burning argument. A significant share of activity had moved to layer-2 networks, he said, where users paid “almost nothing” to settle transactions.
Howe identified a tension in designing around token burns: maximizing them would also encourage higher gas prices, which users do not want.
Buterin likewise questioned what Ethereum would have to become to justify its valuation through fees alone. Referring to an approximately $270 billion market capitalization at the time, he said optimizing fee burning to support that valuation would effectively turn Ethereum into a “world-scale major corporation.” In his view, that would undermine decentralization, one of the network’s central selling points.
The alternative case: resilience and distribution
Binji Pande, a founding member of Ethlabs, supported Buterin’s position and described ETH to Decrypt as a more “future-proof store of value” than Bitcoin. He pointed to censorship resistance, broad availability, what he called “great distribution,” and Ethereum’s role in tokenization, stablecoins and decentralized finance.
Pande also argued that gold’s physical storage and portability constraints limit its usefulness in a globalized economy. His preference for ETH over Bitcoin rested partly on concerns about future AI and quantum-computing threats.
Decrypt reported that the Ethereum Foundation had established a dedicated post-quantum team in January 2026, while researchers had also debated potential AI-powered threats. The article described the Bitcoin community as more divided over how to address quantum risks.
Ethlabs co-founder Julian Ma argued that Ethereum’s investments in security and formal verification strengthened its position as a programmable store-of-value asset. Those statements represent the contributors’ assessments, not guarantees of future security or purchasing-power preservation.
Distribution was another part of Pande’s argument. He said the Ethereum Foundation owned less than 0.2% of ETH and that the token had traded for 11 years. He contrasted that history with newer assets, whose fair distribution he considered difficult to establish and whose ownership he believed could become concentrated.
Howe agreed with Buterin’s overall direction but criticized the timing. He said the Ethereum Foundation needed to listen more closely to applications building on the network, adding that the change in messaging had taken too long.