Source published November 9, 2026, at 16:05 UTC+8. Original reporting by Zack Abrams of The Block; Chinese translation by Saoirse of Foresight News.
Vitalik Buterin has argued that Ethereum’s investment narrative should center on ETH as a store of value rather than as a token valued primarily through transaction-fee burning. His position is not a call to remove EIP-1559, but a warning against treating its burn mechanism as a dependable valuation floor.
According to the report, Buterin posted on X at 8 p.m. Beijing time on the Sunday preceding publication. He said Ethereum’s lasting value comes from decentralization, censorship resistance, privacy, security and its ability to survive over the long term.
EIP-1559 stays; the valuation argument changes
EIP-1559, implemented in 2021, burns a portion of transaction fees. Buterin said the mechanism works well and should remain, even when the amount burned only partially offsets newly issued ETH. He argued that ETH could retain other sources of value even if the burn rate remained below 10% of the level needed to offset issuance over the long term.
That distinction challenges the “ultrasound money” narrative popularized during the 2021 bull market. Buterin outlined a burn-based valuation model in which a token’s market capitalization equals the annual value burned divided by a discount rate. Burning $1 billion annually at a 4% discount rate would imply a theoretical valuation floor of $25 billion.
The problem, he argued, is that this floor is not necessarily reliable. Much of the ETH burned between 2021 and 2023 came from demand originating within the crypto economy itself—demand that could contract alongside ETH’s price. A stronger floor would require fee-generating demand from the external, real-world economy.
The report identified one example as Yuga Labs’ Otherside land sale, during which buyers paid more than $10,000 in fees at the high end to acquire Otherdeed NFTs. Buterin cited $180 million in fee burning in a single day associated with an NFT sale. At the time of the report, an Otherdeed NFT was priced at approximately $150.
Buterin said growth in tokenized real-world assets gives Ethereum a better foundation of external demand. However, he described these as relatively mature, steady businesses, unlikely to reproduce earlier fee spikes.
The Block’s figures illustrate the decline: Ethereum burned about 1.48 million ETH, worth approximately $3.6 billion, in 2022. For 2026 through the reporting date, the corresponding figures were approximately 19,200 ETH and $43 million.
Why maximizing burns could conflict with Ethereum’s goals
Buterin compared supporting ETH’s roughly $270 billion market capitalization through fee burning alone with operating a large corporation such as L’Oréal. The Block’s market page put ETH’s capitalization at $273.3 billion on the Sunday morning referenced in the report.
He cited an AI-generated estimate that L’Oréal spends approximately 0.58% of its market capitalization annually on research and development. Applying that ratio to Ethereum, he argued, would exhaust the Ethereum Foundation’s resources almost immediately. Funding the equivalent through the protocol would require around 700,000 ETH annually and reduce validator earnings by two-thirds.
This was a hypothetical comparison, not an announced funding change. The estimate of L’Oréal’s spending was attributed to AI, rather than presented as independently verified financial data.
The report also placed the discussion against continuing disputes over the Foundation’s treasury management. It said the Foundation sold 20,000 ETH to Bitmine for approximately $47 million over two weeks in April and May 2026. Buterin acknowledged in May that community members frequently saw a gap between the Foundation’s actions and its public commitments.
Earlier in 2026, the Foundation began staking part of its treasury. A March mandate document positioned it as one of the network’s many stewards. Amid several core staff departures in May, Buterin said it would streamline its structure, reduce ETH sales and focus on public infrastructure that other organizations were unwilling to support.
More broadly, he argued that optimizing Ethereum for token burning would require highly interventionist governance, conflicting with decentralization and resistance to capture. Prioritizing burns could also mean pushing gas fees higher, excluding users—including people who most need privacy and security.
Network survival as a roadmap criterion
Buterin said community members most often emphasized decentralization and the qualities he groups under CROPS: censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and security. For ETH’s store-of-value role, he identified the network’s long-term survival as the foremost criterion.
He connected that objective to discussions about post-quantum security, a degree of base-protocol ossification, and higher thresholds for adding precompiles or protocol rewards. He also highlighted work on multisignature wallets, the Kohaku privacy project, the FOCIL censorship-resistance proposal and light clients. These were described as areas of work, not as a single activated upgrade.
Buterin said he had run a node on his laptop, synchronizing it in under six hours while using one-eighth of its disk space. He also argued that growth in assets native to Ethereum—including tokenized real-world assets—can reinforce ETH’s store-of-value role by expanding uses such as collateral.
The report said Buterin had presented a roadmap through 2030 in September 2026 and suggested that the forthcoming Hegota upgrade would likely be Ethereum’s last regular hard fork. That remained an expectation, not an established endpoint for protocol changes.
A withdrawn proposal, not an adopted reward change
The report linked the debate to EIP-8363, whose co-authors had withdrawn it from consideration for Hegota five weeks before Buterin’s post. Hegota was described as following the delayed Glamsterdam hard fork.
EIP-8363 would have progressively increased the share of validator rewards burned as the amount of staked ETH rose. Its proponents argued that excessive staking could threaten ETH’s monetary properties. SharpLink CEO Joseph Chalom and Aave founder Stani Kulechov opposed it. The source also reported plans by the authors for a separate discussion during an April EthCC event, without clarifying the year.
Industry responses to Buterin’s broader argument included support from Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, who agreed that fees should not be the core product. MetaLeX lawyer Gabriel Shapiro characterized the post as a return to reason for the industry. Moonrock Capital founder Simon Dedic described the store-of-value narrative as Ethereum’s strongest bullish case and the easiest to explain to institutional capital. Those comments were assessments, not evidence of future returns.