Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says the network should focus on ETH as a store of value, not on its fee burn. The ETH fee burn, he argued, “never was as strong as it seemed.”

In a thread on X, Buterin stressed that the burn introduced with EIP-1559 should stay. “But we should not feel sad if fee burn is < 10% of breakeven indefinitely; the value of ETH comes from elsewhere,” the co-founder wrote.

Why the ETH Fee Burn Falls Short

Buterin’s argument starts with a simple valuation model. Under it, a token’s market cap equals the fees burned divided by a discount rate.

To justify a market cap of around $270 billion through burns alone, Ethereum would need to operate like a global corporation such as L’Oréal. According to Buterin, that would require about 700,000 ETH a year in protocol funding for research and development. As a result, validator revenue would fall by two-thirds.

Ethereum would also need “highly interventionist governance,” the co-founder added. Moreover, chasing a higher ETH fee burn means pushing gas prices up. That could price out users who need privacy and security the most.

Stability as Ethereum’s Main Selling Point

Instead, Buterin points to decentralization and CROPS, short for censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and security. Unlike the Ethereum fee burn, these properties translate into stability. “And in the era of AI disruption, stability will be highly valued,” the co-founder wrote.

For a store of value, the most important metric is “to survive,” Buterin added. That goal ties into Ethereum’s post-quantum roadmap and its aim of at least partial ossification. A growing number of assets issued on Ethereum’s main chain would also add to ETH’s utility, he said.

The comments mark a shift from the “ultrasound money” narrative built around the ETH fee burn. They also come amid a heated debate over the Glamsterdam upgrade, which developers warn could break existing contracts. Earlier, Buterin called Hegota, the upgrade after Glamsterdam, Ethereum’s last “normal” fork.

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