Vitalik Buterin wants Ethereum to compete with Bitcoin as a store of value

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https://cryptoast.fr/vitalik-buterin-ethereum-eth-reserve-de-valeur-burn-frais/

In a series of four messages published this November 8, 2026 on

The co-founder of Ethereum does not question the EIP-1559 mechanism, introduced in 2021 to burn a portion of each transaction fee. He even judges that this improvement remains useful and should therefore be retained. But he invites the community not to worry if the share of fees burned “remains permanently less than 10% of the breakeven”, which is the balance point where the ETH destroyed compensates for the ETH created to remunerate the network's validators.

Expanding on why I believe "ETH as store of value (SoV)" makes much more sense to focus on than "ETH as fee-burning token".

1. ETH as fee-burning token never was as strong as it seemed 2. Optimizing for ETH as fee-burning token would demand Ethereum and…

Vitalik Buterin details why, according to him, the narrative of a “deflationary” ETH, or “ultrasound money” as the Ethereum community liked to call it, is not viable. To illustrate his reasoning, the co-founder of Ethereum recalls the classic argument of supporters of the “token that burns its fees”: if the network destroys $1 billion worth of ETH in fees each year, these destroyed ethers benefit all holders, since there are fewer remaining in circulation. ETH should therefore be worth at least a certain amount, which would serve as a valuation floor.

But according to him, this floor amount has never been solid. Between 2021 and 2023, most of the fees burned came from activities that only exist in the crypto ecosystem, such as NFT sales or lending. However, these activities are paid for in ETH, and if the price of crypto collapses, users have less money to spend, these activities slow down, and there are fewer fees to burn. The floor therefore falls at the same time as the price, which prevents it from playing its role as a safety net.

Vitalik cites a telling example: “in a single day, around $180 million in fees were burned during a sale of digital monkeys”, undoubtedly referring to the sale organized by Yuga Labs (the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs) on April 30 and May 1, 2022. But if ETH had lost 90% of its value before this sale, the buyers would have had 10 times less means, and these fees would also have faded in terms of dollar value. For the floor to hold, revenues from outside of crypto are needed, such as those from the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA).

Machine-translated from French