Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is urging the crypto community to stop valuing ETH primarily as a fee-burning token and instead treat it as a store of value, arguing that the burn mechanism was never as strong as it seemed.
In a Sunday post on X, Buterin wrote: "We should not feel sad if fee burn is < 10% of breakeven indefinitely; the value of ETH comes from elsewhere." That value, he argued, stems from Ethereum's stability, which is underpinned by decentralization, censorship resistance, and strong security.
The shift in messaging is notable. In 2021, when Ethereum began burning a portion of every transaction fee, the community branded ETH as "ultrasound money," with the argument that increased usage would reduce supply and drive up the price. Buterin now says that framing overstated the burn's importance.
Fee burn 'never a true floor'
Supporters of the fee-burning structure previously argued that fees gave ETH a price floor, similar to how a company's stock might be backed by revenue and profits. From 2021 to 2023, Ethereum burned millions of ETH each year, but Buterin said this was "never a true floor." Most of those burns, he noted, came from internal crypto 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 further weakened the fee-burning argument. A significant portion of activity has moved to layer-2 networks, where users pay "almost nothing" to settle transactions, he said. Optimizing for a fee-burning token would also mean optimizing for higher gas prices—something no one wants, Howe added.
Buterin echoed that concern, saying that if Ethereum were optimized for fee burning to justify a present-day ~$270 billion market cap, the network would essentially function as a world-scale major corporation. In doing so, it would lose one of its major selling points: decentralization.
A 'future-proof' store of value
Binji Pande, founding member of Ethlabs, told Decrypt he agrees with Buterin and believes ETH is best positioned as a "future-proof store of value." He highlighted the network's censorship resistance, "great distribution," wide availability, and its central role in growing sectors such as tokenization, stablecoins, and DeFi.
A store of value is an asset that holds its worth over time, allowing investors to park money without fear it will disappear. Historically, gold has been seen as the ultimate store of value, and Bitcoin supporters have pitched it as "digital gold."
Pande argued that both fall short compared to Ethereum. "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," he told Decrypt. "Storing gold is simply not useful either past a certain point; you reach physical limits."
As for Bitcoin, Pande expressed concern that it isn't "future-proof" given looming AI and quantum threats. Ethereum has been preparing for those threats: in January, the Ethereum Foundation formed a dedicated post-quantum team, and researchers have more recently debated potential AI-powered threats. By contrast, the Bitcoin community appears more fractured on how to tackle the quantum threat.
"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 added that newer assets can't compete with ETH as a store of value because there's no way to verify they're fairly distributed. The Ethereum Foundation owns less than 0.2% of ETH, he said, and 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," he said. "It can and WILL get centralized."
Not everyone thinks Ethereum's leadership moved quickly enough. Howe said the Ethereum Foundation "needs to start to actually listen and look at the applications building on top of their network." Of Buterin's recent post, he added: "I think he is right, and I think it took too long to say it."
