Historical report based on The Block’s article published November 8, 2026, at 23:51:15 UTC+08:00. Dates, prices and proposal status below reflect that reporting.
Vitalik Buterin argued that Ethereum should prioritize the qualities that make ETH a store of value rather than optimize the protocol to burn more tokens. His position was not a call to remove EIP-1559: he said the fee-burning mechanism introduced in 2021 should remain, even if it offsets only a small fraction of new ETH issuance.
The distinction matters for Ethereum’s roadmap. Buterin argued that maximizing burn would require substantial protocol-funded spending, interventionist governance and, to some degree, higher transaction costs—requirements he considers incompatible with decentralization and resistance to capture.
EIP-1559 stays; the valuation argument changes
In an X thread on Sunday morning, Buterin described EIP-1559 as “fine and good,” while rejecting the idea that ETH’s value must depend on burning enough transaction fees to balance issuance.
“But we should not feel sad if fee burn is < 10% of breakeven indefinitely; the value of ETH comes from elsewhere,” he wrote.
He examined the valuation model behind the “ultrasound money” thesis that gained traction during the 2021 bull market. In that model, annual token burn divided by a discount rate produces an implied valuation: burning $1 billion annually at a 4% discount rate would imply $25 billion.
Buterin’s objection was that this was never a dependable valuation floor. Much of the burn in 2021–2023 came from crypto-internal activity whose revenue could decline alongside ETH’s price. A floor, he argued, requires revenue backed by external demand.
He cited a sale that burned $180 million in fees in one day, describing it as a “digital monkey sale.” The Block clarified that the event was the Otherdeed digital-land sale for Yuga Labs’ Otherside metaverse, rather than a sale of Bored Ape NFTs. Users paid as much as $10,000 in transaction fees for Otherdeed NFTs that, at the time of the article, sold for around $150.
Buterin said tokenized real-world assets give Ethereum a stronger claim to externally backed demand. However, he added that a mature, stable business of that kind is unlikely to generate comparable fee spikes.
According to data cited by The Block, Ethereum burned approximately 1.48 million ETH in 2022, worth roughly $3.6 billion, compared with about 19,200 ETH, or $43 million, during 2026 up to the report.
Why optimizing for burn could change protocol governance
Buterin compared a fee-burn-based justification for ETH’s roughly $270 billion market capitalization with valuing a large company such as L’Oréal. The Block put ETH’s market capitalization at $273.3 billion that Sunday morning.
Citing an AI-generated estimate—not an independently established spending figure—Buterin said L’Oréal spends around 0.58% of its market capitalization annually on research and development. Matching that rate, he argued, would “bankrupt the [Ethereum Foundation] almost immediately.” His alternative illustration involved about 700,000 ETH annually in in-protocol funding, which he said would cut validator revenue by two-thirds.
He also argued that pursuing burn would require “highly interventionist governance, for the long term.” Optimizing for higher gas prices could exclude users, including those with the greatest need for privacy and security.
The Block placed those comments against existing criticism of Ethereum Foundation funding and ETH sales. It reported that the foundation sold 20,000 ETH, worth about $47 million, to Bitmine over two weeks in April and May 2026. The foundation had begun staking part of its treasury earlier that year, and its March mandate described it as “one of many stewards” of Ethereum. Amid senior staff departures in May, Buterin said it would become “a smaller ship,” sell less ETH and concentrate on work that “would not happen otherwise.”
Survival and security as roadmap priorities
Buterin said users most often point to decentralization and CROPS—censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and security—as Ethereum’s defining strengths. For ETH held as a store of value, he called survival “the first and most important SoV-ish metric.”
He connected that objective with developer-conference themes including:
- Post-quantum security.
- Partial ossification of the base layer, meaning limits on further changes to parts of the protocol.
- A high threshold for introducing new precompiles or in-protocol rewards.
He also highlighted multisig wallets, the Kohaku privacy project, the FOCIL censorship-resistance proposal and lightweight nodes. As an example of node accessibility, he said his laptop node synchronized in under six hours and occupied one-eighth of his hard drive.
These were priorities and examples of work, not an announcement that every item had been activated on Ethereum.
Buterin argued that assets issued natively on Ethereum’s base layer, including real-world assets, complement the store-of-value case by expanding uses for ETH, such as collateral. He described Ethereum as a hybrid architecture combining blockchains and modern cryptography. The article also recalled his September roadmap discussion through 2030, when he said the upcoming Hegota upgrade would likely be Ethereum’s last “normal” fork.
EIP-8363 had been withdrawn from Hegota consideration
The thread came about five weeks after EIP-8363’s co-authors withdrew the proposal from consideration for Hegota. It was not an activated change to validator rewards.
The proposal would have burned a rising share of validator rewards as the amount of staked ETH increased. It cited risks that a high staking ratio could pose to “ETH’s role as money” and drew opposition from SharpLink CEO Joseph Chalom and Aave founder Stani Kulechov.
At the time of the report, Hegota was expected to follow the delayed Glamsterdam hard fork. EIP-8363’s authors planned a separate issuance process running through EthCC in April.
Buterin’s broader argument drew support from Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, who said fees cannot be the product, and MetaLeX attorney Gabriel Shapiro. Moonrock Capital founder Simon Dedic characterized the store-of-value framing as a strong case for Ethereum and a simpler narrative for institutional capital; that was his assessment, not an established outcome.
The Block reported ETH trading at $2,236 at 9:23 a.m. ET on November 8, down 0.3% on the day.