Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined a clearer long-term framing for the network’s native asset.
In a thread posted on X on November 8, 2026, he argued that, in its present configuration, Ethereum aligns more naturally with a store-of-value role for ETH than with a model that treats the token primarily as something whose value depends on continuous fee burning.
Sustaining the fee-burn thesis at the scale implied by current market valuations, he contended, would push the protocol toward the operating patterns of a large corporation—substantial ongoing spending and highly interventionist governance—and would sit uneasily with the network’s decentralized principles.
Buterin did not call for removing the fee-burn mechanism introduced by EIP-1559 in 2021.
He described the burn as fine and worth retaining.
At the same time, he wrote that the community need not be concerned if the amount burned remains below 10 percent of the level required for monetary break-even indefinitely, because the value of ETH derives from other sources.
He identified three main reasons for preferring the store-of-value emphasis.
First, the fee-burn valuation case was never as robust as it appeared. Under a simple net-present-value framing, a token that permanently destroys a stable stream of fees can be thought of as having a valuation floor equal to annual burns divided by a discount rate.
In 2021–2023 Ethereum destroyed large quantities of ETH, yet most of that activity stemmed from crypto-internal uses whose revenue would have contracted sharply if the price of ETH itself fell.
An external economic base is required for the floor argument to hold reliably.
While the expanding market for tokenized real-world assets strengthens Ethereum’s claim to such external activity, a mature, stable market is also less likely to produce the sudden, extreme fee spikes seen during earlier speculative episodes.
Second, deliberately maximizing fee burns in order to underwrite a market capitalization on the order of $270 billion would require Ethereum to function like a major global company—roughly comparable in scale to a firm such as L’Oréal.
Real corporations of that size spend continuously (research and development alone can run to a sizable fraction of market capitalization each year) and make strongly opinionated product and market choices to stay relevant.
Meeting those demands through the protocol itself would imply large in-protocol funding flows and persistent interventionist governance. Both features cut against capture resistance and decentralization.
In addition, optimizing for higher fee revenue tends to favor higher gas prices, which can exclude users who particularly need the network’s privacy and security properties.
Third, focusing on ETH as a store of value is consistent with the qualities people most often cite when they explain what they value about Ethereum: decentralization together with censorship and capture resistance, open-source development, privacy, and security (collectively referred to as CROPS).
These properties translate into practical stability. In an era of rapid AI-driven disruption, stability is likely to be especially prized.
For holders, the most important store-of-value metric is simply the ability of the system to survive.
That priority favors conservative security choices, at least partial protocol ossification once core work is complete, minimized protocol politics, and continued progress on private and secure custody, inclusion guarantees, and low infrastructure dependence.
Expanding on why I believe "ETH as store of value (SoV)" makes much more sense to focus on than "ETH as fee-burning token".
Three primary reasons:
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.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 8, 2026
Broader adoption of assets natively issued on the base layer—both real-world assets and decentralized ones—can still reinforce the store-of-value case by expanding what holders can usefully do with ETH, provided the trade-offs with decentralization remain manageable.
While this narrative discussion continues, developers are addressing a more immediate technical constraint.
Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, includes EIP-8037 and EIP-8038.
These proposals raise the gas charged for creating new state (accounts, storage slots, deployed code) and for accessing or modifying existing state.
The base cost of creating a contract, for example, would rise substantially before additional storage and execution charges are applied.
Many existing contracts were written under the assumption that these costs would remain stable; some forward fixed gas amounts on every call or rely on remaining-gas checks.
When those assumptions no longer hold, calls can fail, and because deployed contracts are immutable, the resulting problems cannot always be patched in place.
Security researchers have identified invariants that the changes would break, prompting All Core Developers to delay the Hoodi testnet activation until the issues are resolved.
On November 8, two developers submitted competing draft proposals aimed at introducing the new gas schedule without disrupting applications already holding user funds.
Leo Glisic’s draft (EIP-8488) would preserve the legacy gas schedule for contracts already deployed and require only newly deployed contracts to use a parallel set of versioned “V2” opcodes that carry the higher EIP-8037/8038 prices.
Giulio Rebuffo’s alternative would apply the new prices for billing purposes across the board, yet maintain a second, parallel gas meter so that existing contracts continue to see execution behavior consistent with the old rules.
Both drafts remain early-stage; neither has been adopted, and both would require further client implementation and testing.
Core developers have previously estimated that the next private test window could open in mid-to-late November, though that timeline was set before the new proposals appeared.
The developments illustrate different layers of Ethereum’s evolution: a high-level reassessment of what ultimately underpins the value of ETH, and concrete engineering work to keep planned protocol improvements from fracturing the existing contract base.
