Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argued on Sunday that ETH should be judged mainly as a store of value, not as a fee-burning token whose price is backed by the fees it destroys. In a four-post thread from 12:06 UTC, he said the EIP-1559 burn is “fine and good” and should stay, but that nobody should “feel sad” if it covers less than 10% of what a valuation floor would need, indefinitely. That is a co-founder’s view, not a protocol change, but it cuts against one of the most repeated pitches for owning ETH.

The rundown

  • What changed: Since EIP-1559 (August 2021), every transaction’s base fee is destroyed, or burned. The bull case treats ETH like a share: market cap equals fees burned divided by a discount rate, the return people demand for waiting. Buterin’s own example: $1 billion burned a year at a 4% rate implies a $25 billion floor. His thread argues that floor was never solid, because most of the 2021-23 burn came from crypto-internal activity that would shrink if ETH fell.
  • Why it matters: Chasing fees, he wrote, would turn Ethereum into something like a company the size of L’Oréal. That would need in-protocol R&D funding he put at about 700,000 ETH a year, cutting validator revenue by two-thirds, plus interventionist governance and gas prices high enough to price out users. He argues the store-of-value case is better served by what users already value: decentralisation and “CROPS”, his shorthand for resistance to censorship and capture, open source, privacy and security.
  • Where it breaks: A store of value is a market verdict, not a design choice. ETH supply is growing, not shrinking, which a would-be store of value has to explain next to bitcoin’s fixed cap; one ether bought 0.0295 BTC on Kraken at 14:50 UTC. His roadmap also leans on partial ossification, a base layer that stops changing, which narrows what can be added later. And his formula has an uncomfortable twin: if fees do not set a floor, nothing in the protocol does.
  • By the numbers: 122.2 million ETH in supply, up 86,731 ETH in 30 days, about 0.86% a year annualised, per ultrasound.money at 14:49 UTC. 2,714 ETH ($6.2 million) burned in those 30 days, and 4.64 million ETH since the burn began. At $2,238 on Kraken, that supply is worth about $273.5 billion. Our arithmetic: the 30-day burn annualises to $75.8 million, or 0.7% of the $10.9 billion a 4% rate would require.

His own to-do list runs from multisig safety and Kohaku privacy work to FOCIL, which stops block builders censoring transfers. Related: EIP-8453’s faster-finality proposal, the ether fund outflows and how bond yields affect bitcoin.

Thread: Vitalik Buterin on X, 8 Nov 2026

This article is for information only and is not investment advice.