Key facts
- Buterin said the fee burn was never a true floor and that ETH's value comes from elsewhere.
- Buterin said most burns from 2021 to 2023 came from internal crypto uses such as lending and NFT purchases.
- Buterin said optimizing ETH for fee burning to justify a roughly $270B market cap would make Ethereum function like a world-scale corporation.
- Ethlabs founding member Binji Pande told Decrypt ETH is a more future-proof store of value than Bitcoin, citing AI and quantum threats.
- Enso CEO Connor Howe told Decrypt layer-2 expansion weakened the fee-burn argument because users pay almost nothing to settle transactions.
- Ethlabs co-founder Julian Ma told Decrypt security is ingrained more deeply into Ethereum's culture than anywhere else.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argued in a post on November 8, 2026 that ETH should be valued as a store of value rather than as a fee-burning token, saying the burn was never a true floor. He wrote that the value of ETH comes from elsewhere, namely stability derived from Ethereum being decentralized, resistant to censorship and strongly secured.
Buterin said he would not view a fee burn below 10% of breakeven indefinitely as a cause for sadness. He said most of the ETH burned between 2021 and 2023 came from internal crypto uses such as lending and NFT purchases. He also said that optimizing ETH for fee burning to justify a present-day market cap of roughly $270 billion would make Ethereum function like a world-scale major corporation, at the cost of decentralization.
The comments mark a shift from the ultrasound money framing that followed Ethereum's 2021 move to burn a portion of every transaction fee, an argument that fewer coins in circulation would support a higher price. Decrypt reported that Binji Pande, a founding member of Ethlabs, agreed with Buterin and told the outlet that ETH is a more future-proof store of value than Bitcoin, citing AI and quantum threats. Pande said gold cannot offer the portability a more globalized world requires, and that the Ethereum Foundation owns less than 0.2% of ETH, which has traded for 11 years.