Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says ETH’s value comes from stability, not from the fees the network burns.
In a post on X on Sunday, 8 November, Buterin said ETH should be valued as a store of value rather than as a fee-burning token. He tied that stability to Ethereum’s decentralisation, resistance to censorship and strong security.
Moving on from ultrasound money
The comments mark a shift away from the “ultrasound money” idea that became popular in 2021, when Ethereum started burning part of every transaction fee. The argument was that more use of the network would burn more ETH, shrinking the supply and pushing up the price.
Buterin said burning fees was “never a true floor” for ETH’s value. He said most of the fees burned had come from activity inside crypto itself, such as lending and “silly NFT purchases.”
“We should not feel sad if fee burn is < 10% of breakeven indefinitely; the value of ETH comes from elsewhere,” he wrote.
He argued that designing Ethereum to burn enough fees to justify a market value of about $270 billion would turn it into something like a world-scale corporation, at the cost of decentralisation.
Why the burn has faded
Connor Howe, co-founder and chief executive of Enso, said the growth of layer-2 networks has weakened the case for fee burns, because users pay almost nothing to settle transactions on them. Pushing for more burning would mean higher fees on Ethereum itself, which he said no one wants.
Howe agreed with Buterin but said it “took too long to say it,” adding that the Ethereum Foundation “needs to start to actually listen” to the apps building on the network.
A store of value case
Binji Pande, a founding member of Ethlabs, also backed the shift. He called ETH a “future-proof store of value,” pointing to its wide distribution, resistance to censorship and central role in tokenisation, stablecoins and DeFi. He noted that the Ethereum Foundation holds less than 0.2% of all ETH, and that the token has traded for 11 years.
Julian Ma, another Ethlabs co-founder, said security is deeply built into Ethereum’s culture, and that threats such as possible breaks in cryptography strengthen the case for ETH as a programmable store of value. The Ethereum Foundation set up a dedicated team in January to prepare for quantum computing threats.
What happens next
The debate is likely to shape how the Ethereum community talks about ETH’s value, and whether future upgrades focus on keeping fees low and the network decentralised rather than on burning more ETH.
