Vitalik Buterin wants ether valued as a store of value, not as a fee-burning token. In a thread on X on Sunday 8 November, the Ethereum co-founder said the EIP-1559 fee burn should stay, but that ETH holders should not mind if it stays below 10% of breakeven for good, according to The Block’s account of the thread, published at 10:52 AM EST (15:52 UTC). U.Today, Crypto Briefing and PANews gave the same reading. Ether was at $2,228 around 17:40 UTC, down 1.65% over seven days.
The thread lands after five straight weekly declines for ETH, and at a time when the amount of ether destroyed by fees has almost vanished. The burn reached about 1.48 million ETH in 2022, worth roughly $3.6 billion, and only about 19,200 ETH, around $43 million, so far in 2026, The Block calculated. For years, “ultrasound money” and a supply that shrinks when the network is busy were the main pitch to ETH holders. Buterin is now telling them to look elsewhere.
The opening post went out on the @VitalikButerin account on Sunday morning, US time. In it, Buterin set the two framings side by side and said ETH as a store of value is the one worth focusing on, according to The Block and U.Today, which both link the post.
Why Buterin says the ETH burn was never a price floor
The case for the burn as a floor went like this: if the network destroys a steady stream of fees, the token is worth at least the present value of that stream. Buterin does not reject the arithmetic. He rejects the input. Most of what was burned between 2021 and 2023 came from activity inside crypto, trading and speculation that shrinks when the price of ETH falls, he wrote, according to The Block. So it was never a real floor, he argued, a point PANews and Crypto Briefing report in the same terms.
His example of fees that spike for no lasting reason was a sale of digital monkey pictures. The Block identified it as Yuga Labs’ Otherside land sale of spring 2022, which burned about $180 million of fees in a single day. Buyers paid up to $10,000 in gas for Otherdeed NFTs that now sell for about $150, the outlet added.
A floor only holds if the revenue behind it comes from outside crypto, Buterin argued. Tokenized real-world assets give Ethereum a stronger case for that kind of outside backing, he wrote, but he expects that business to behave like a steady, mature company rather than a source of fee spikes, The Block reported.
He gave a worked number. A token that burns $1 billion a year, valued with a 4% discount rate, has a floor of $25 billion. Run the same sum the other way and a market value of about $270 billion, the figure Buterin used for ETH, would need roughly $10.8 billion of fees burned every year at that rate. The 2026 burn so far is $43 million.
ETH burn rate: from 1.48 million ETH in 2022 to about 19,200 in 2026
The burn dates from the London upgrade, which went live on 5 August 2021 at block 12,965,000 and brought in EIP-1559, according to the list of upgrades on ethereum.org. Since then part of every transaction fee, the base fee, is destroyed rather than paid to block producers. The Merge on 15 September 2022 replaced blockchain and earns a reward, which makes rewriting history very expensive.">mining with proof of stake and cut new issuance. For about a year and a half after it, the burn mostly outpaced issuance and the supply drifted lower.
The turn came with Dencun on 13 March 2024. Its EIP-4844 added “blobs”, a cheaper data lane for layer-2 networks such as Arbitrum and Base, and the fees those networks pay to the main chain dropped. On ultrasound.money data, the ETH supply hit its post-Merge low of about 120.06 million on 5 April 2024, three weeks later, and has risen since.
| Date | ETH supply (ultrasound.money) | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 15 Sep 2022 | 120.52 million | The Merge |
| 1 Jan 2024 | 120.18 million | Supply still shrinking |
| 5 Apr 2024 | 120.06 million | Post-Merge low, after Dencun (13 Mar 2024) |
| 1 Jan 2025 | 120.47 million | Still just under the Merge level |
| 1 Jan 2026 | 121.34 million | Net issuance accelerates |
| 8 Nov 2026, 17:46 UTC | 122.20 million | Up about 865,000 ETH since 1 January |
In other words, ultrasound.money shows about 1.68 million more ETH in circulation than on the day of the Merge, an increase of about 1.4%. Over the last 30 days the supply grew by about 86,700 ETH. Crypto Briefing wrote that fee burns now account for only about 2.07% of new issuance, and that fewer fees reach the main chain as activity moves to layer-2 networks.
What “10% of breakeven” means
Breakeven is the point where the ETH burned equals the ETH issued to validators, so the supply stops growing. Under 10% of breakeven means the burn removes less than a tenth of new issuance. On Crypto Briefing’s 2.07% figure, ETH is already far below that line, so Buterin is in effect saying today’s situation is acceptable. Issuance itself goes to stakers, as explained in our guide to proof of stake in depth.
Chasing fees would push Ethereum toward a company, Buterin argues
Buterin also looked at what it would take to justify ETH’s price with protocol revenue alone. A company valued like that would have to reinvest in research, he wrote, using L’Oréal as the comparison: an AI-generated estimate put the cosmetics group’s research spending at 0.58% of its market value per year, The Block reported. Matching that rate from inside the protocol would take about 700,000 ETH a year, a figure PANews and Crypto Briefing also give, and would cut validator revenue by about two-thirds. Paid by the Ethereum Foundation instead, it would bankrupt the Foundation almost at once, he added.
A burn-maximizing Ethereum would also need heavy-handed governance for the long run and higher gas prices, Buterin wrote according to The Block. Those prices could shut out users, including some of those who most need privacy and security. PANews summed up the same passage: that kind of intervention clashes with decentralization and censorship resistance.
The fee debate is sharper because rival chains now report their own revenue. ARK Invest counted that Robinhood Chain out-earned Ethereum in the third quarter, as we reported on 22 October. Under Buterin’s framing, that comparison matters less for ETH than holders have been told.
What an Ethereum store of value needs, in Buterin’s list
If the value does not come from the burn, where does it come from? Buterin’s answer starts with endurance. The first thing a store of value must do is survive, he wrote, and stability will be prized in a period of disruption driven by artificial intelligence, according to The Block. Crypto Briefing reports the AI argument too: an asset that rests on no single company or institution may look safer when technology upends existing systems.
His list of the work that serves that goal includes post-quantum security, a base layer that is partly frozen and changes less over time (developers call this ossification), a high bar for new precompiles or in-protocol rewards, multisig wallets, the Kohaku privacy project and FOCIL, a proposal meant to make transactions harder to censor.
Light nodes are on the list too. Buterin said his own laptop node synced in under six hours and uses about an eighth of his hard drive, according to The Block. U.Today summed up his values with the acronym CROPS: “censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and security”.
He does not dismiss real-world assets. Growth in assets issued natively on Ethereum works in favour of the store-of-value case, he wrote, since it gives holders more places to use ETH as collateral.
Reactions: Yakovenko agrees, the burn camp has not gone away
Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko replied on X on 8 November: “Vitalik is absolutely right that you can’t focus on fees as the product.” A chain should instead “pick a product, the thing that brings value to people, and do that really well,” he wrote in the post, which U.Today embeds. Gabriel Shapiro, a lawyer at MetaLeX, greeted the thread as a sign of the community returning to its roots, and Moonrock Capital founder Simon Dedic called the store-of-value framing the biggest bull case for Ethereum and the easiest story to sell to institutions, The Block reported.
The other camp is still there. On 1 October, Ethereum France president Jérôme de Tychey withdrew EIP-8363 from the Hegota upgrade, Unchained reported. The proposal, co-written by Justin Drake among six authors, would have burned a share of validator rewards that grows with the amount of ETH staked, up to 100% at 60.25 million ETH staked. Applied in full, it would have cut staking yield from about 2.6% to 1.2%, by the authors’ own estimate.
SharpLink chief executive Joseph Chalom opposed the plan, The Block noted, and Aave founder Stani Kulechov, who pushed back in August, called the withdrawal a “Great move,” according to Unchained. The authors still stand by its aim and want a dedicated issuance process, with Lido offering to help, running from a forum at Devcon this month to EthCC in April.
The Ethereum Foundation’s own ETH sales sit behind the debate
How Ethereum pays for its own research is not an abstract question. The Ethereum Foundation sold 20,000 ETH, about $47 million, to Bitmine over two weeks in April and May, The Block noted; Bitmine itself held 6.04 million ETH in October, as our report on its treasury showed. The Foundation started staking part of its treasury this year and, in a mandate published in March, described itself as one steward of the network among many. In May, amid senior departures, Buterin said it would become smaller and sell less ETH.
Market backdrop: a fifth weekly decline for ether
ETH was at $2,228 around 17:40 UTC on Sunday, down 0.33% over 24 hours, with Bitcoin near $75,680 and the crypto Fear and Greed index at 28, according to Coindaro’s market snapshot. Ether is heading for its fifth weekly red candle in a row and is down 24.39% since 1 January, criptovaluta.it calculated in an article published at 11:37 on Sunday. Its all-time high of $4,955 dates from August 2025, and its 2026 low of $1,505 from June.
US spot ether ETFs lost $365.2 million in the week to Friday 6 November, including $93.3 million on Friday, $90.8 million of it from BlackRock’s ETHA, according to the same outlet. The wider picture of that week is in our analysis of the US week and its ETF outflows. Buterin did not tie his thread to the price.
Next for Ethereum: Glamsterdam on hold, Hegota in parallel
The roadmap Buterin wants judged on stability is itself running late. On 6 November, the Ethereum Foundation’s blog said core developers had decided to “delay the hardfork process and not fork Hoodi until the issues are resolved,” after ChainSecurity found projects that would become vulnerable under two Glamsterdam gas changes, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. The post by Marius van der Wijden asks contract developers to check their code against eight invariants those changes break, and sets no new date.
The Hoodi testnet fork planned for Monday 26 October had already been called off on 22 October, after ChainSecurity said it had found 13 real-world cases, Decrypt reported; the dates are tracked on our Glamsterdam Hoodi event page. Glamsterdam has run on the Sepolia testnet since 6 October.
Work on Hegota, the upgrade after Glamsterdam, “is not affected and is continuing in parallel in full force,” the blog post says. In September, Buterin mapped the roadmap to 2030 and said Hegota is likely the last “normal” fork, The Block recalled. Any new attempt to change ETH issuance would go through the separate process the EIP-8363 authors plan to run until April.