Source published: November 8, 2026, at 23:51:15 UTC+8.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argued that ETH’s store-of-value case deserves more attention than its ability to burn transaction fees, according to The Block’s November 8 report. His argument separates the network’s usefulness from the amount users pay to access it: Ethereum could support valuable financial activity without reproducing the fee spikes of earlier crypto cycles.
Buterin supported retaining EIP-1559, the mechanism introduced in 2021 that burns part of every transaction fee. But he said holders “should not feel sad” if fee burn remains below 10% of the level needed to offset new ETH issuance indefinitely.
Falling burn is not a user-count metric
The Block reported that Ethereum burned about 1.48 million ETH, worth roughly $3.6 billion, in 2022, compared with about 19,200 ETH, or $43 million, in 2026 through the report’s publication. That comparison places a full calendar year against a partial year; it is not a matched-period measure of adoption.
Buterin also questioned whether earlier burn levels provided a dependable valuation foundation. Under the model he described, $1 billion in annual burn divided by a 4% discount rate would imply a $25 billion valuation floor. But that floor would not hold if the revenue supporting it fell alongside ETH’s price.
He argued that much of the burn between 2021 and 2023 came from crypto-internal activity. As an example, he referenced an event that burned $180 million in fees in one day, describing it as a “digital monkey sale.” The Block clarified that this was Yuga Labs’ Otherdeed digital-land sale for the Otherside metaverse, rather than a sale of Bored Ape NFTs themselves.
Those spikes show demand for blockspace during particular events—not, by themselves, durable user adoption or retention.
Real-world assets offer a different kind of activity
Buterin said the growing market for tokenized real-world assets gives Ethereum a stronger claim to revenue backed by activity outside crypto. However, he cautioned that a “normal stable mature business” would be unlikely to generate the same extreme fee spikes.
He also described assets issued natively on Ethereum’s base layer, including real-world assets, as complementary to ETH’s store-of-value role because they expand its uses, such as collateral.
The report supplied no asset-growth rate, holder count or retention measure to quantify that opportunity. The claim is therefore a proposed link between asset issuance and ETH utility, not evidence of a measured increase in lasting adoption.
The cost of maximizing fees
Buterin argued that supporting ETH’s roughly $270 billion market capitalization through burn alone would require substantial spending and interventionist governance.
Using an AI estimate that L’Oréal spends about 0.58% of its market capitalization annually on research and development, he said a comparable commitment would overwhelm the Ethereum Foundation. Funding it through the protocol instead would require about 700,000 ETH a year and cut validator revenue by two-thirds, under his comparison.
He also warned that optimizing burn means, to some extent, optimizing for higher gas prices. That could exclude users, including people who particularly need privacy and security. In his view, sustained intervention to maximize revenue would conflict with Ethereum’s decentralization and resistance to capture.
Resilience as the alternative benchmark
For ETH held as a store of value, Buterin called survival the first and most important metric. He pointed to censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and security, alongside work on post-quantum security, lightweight nodes, multisig wallets, the Kohaku privacy project and the FOCIL censorship-resistance proposal.
His comments followed the withdrawal, about five weeks earlier, of EIP-8363 from consideration for the forthcoming Hegota upgrade. That proposal would have burned an increasing share of validator rewards as more ETH was staked. It faced opposition from SharpLink CEO Joseph Chalom and Aave founder Stani Kulechov.
The distinction for assessing Ethereum’s growth is between fees collected, assets supported and users served. Buterin’s argument favors resilience and broader utility over maximizing burn; the supplied report does not establish how that approach will affect adoption or ETH’s valuation.
