The “ultrasound money” narrative helped turn Ethereum’s fee-burning mechanism into a shared identity among ETH holders during the 2021 bull market. In a thread reported by The Block on November 8, 2026, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin questioned whether that mechanism should remain central to the story holders tell about ETH.
His argument was not to stop burning fees. Instead, he said Ethereum should prioritize ETH’s role as a store of value—and the network’s decentralization, privacy and resilience—rather than optimize for destroying more tokens.
Original publication: November 8, 2026, at 23:51:15 UTC+8. This article reflects the reporting and market context of that date.
What remains of the fee-burn story?
EIP-1559, introduced in 2021, burns part of every transaction fee. Buterin called the mechanism “fine and good” and said it should remain, even if the amount burned offsets only a small fraction of newly issued ETH.
“But we should not feel sad if fee burn is < 10% of breakeven indefinitely; the value of ETH comes from elsewhere,” he wrote.
The attraction of fee burn rests partly on a valuation model: divide annual token burns by a discount rate to arrive at an implied valuation. Buterin’s example was a token burning $1 billion annually at a 4% discount rate, producing an apparent $25 billion valuation floor.
The problem, he argued, is that this was never a dependable floor. Much of Ethereum’s burn from 2021 through 2023 came from “crypto-internal use cases,” whose activity and revenue could decline alongside ETH’s price.
The NFT sale behind the example
Buterin pointed to a “digital monkey sale” that burned $180 million in fees in a single day. The Block clarified that the event was actually the Otherdeed NFT sale for land in Yuga Labs’ Otherside metaverse—not a sale of Bored Ape Yacht Club images themselves.
The distinction matters: the fee spike came from competition to participate in a particular NFT launch. Buyers paid as much as $10,000 in transaction fees for Otherdeeds that, at the time of The Block’s report, sold for around $150.
“The floor argument only works if the backing of the revenue stream is external,” Buterin wrote.
He said the growth of tokenized real-world assets gives Ethereum a stronger claim to that external backing. But he also cautioned that a “normal stable mature business” is unlikely to generate the extraordinary fee spikes associated with speculative crypto activity.
The Block’s data illustrated the change in scale: Ethereum burned about 1.48 million ETH, worth roughly $3.6 billion, in 2022, versus approximately 19,200 ETH, or $43 million, during 2026 up to the report’s publication.
A different set of priorities—and costs
Buterin argued that supporting ETH’s roughly $270 billion market capitalization through fee burn alone would make Ethereum comparable to 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 that L’Oréal spends approximately 0.58% of its market capitalization on annual research and development, Buterin said comparable spending would “bankrupt the [Ethereum Foundation] almost immediately.” His alternative calculation implied in-protocol funding of about 700,000 ETH annually, reducing validator revenue by two-thirds. These figures were part of his comparison, not an announced funding plan.
He also argued that maximizing burn would require “highly interventionist governance, for the long term,” conflicting with his goals for decentralization and resistance to capture. Seeking higher fees could also exclude users, including those who most need privacy and security.
The funding question already carried community friction. The Block noted criticism of Ethereum Foundation ETH sales, including its sale of 20,000 ETH worth about $47 million to Bitmine over two weeks in April and May 2026. Buterin said in May that he regularly heard from community members who felt the foundation’s actions did not match its public commitments.
The foundation began staking part of its treasury earlier that year. Its March mandate described it as “one of many stewards” of Ethereum, and, amid senior staff departures in May, Buterin said it would become “a smaller ship,” selling less ETH and concentrating on work that “would not happen otherwise.”
Survival rather than spectacle
Buterin said people he asks about Ethereum’s value most often point to decentralization and what he calls CROPS: censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and security. That is his account of those conversations, not a measurement of community-wide opinion.
For ETH held as a store of value, he described the first and most important metric as “to survive.” He connected that goal to post-quantum security, partial ossification of the base layer, and a high threshold for new precompiles or in-protocol rewards.
He also highlighted multisig wallets, the Kohaku privacy project, the FOCIL censorship-resistance proposal and lightweight nodes. As a personal example, he said his laptop node synchronized in under six hours and occupied only one-eighth of its hard drive.
Assets issued natively on Ethereum’s base layer, including real-world assets, could complement this approach by expanding uses for ETH, such as collateral, he argued. He described Ethereum as “a hybrid architecture that combines together blockchains and modern cryptography,” rather than simply a blockchain. In September 2026, he had outlined a roadmap through 2030 and said Hegota would likely be Ethereum’s last “normal” fork.
Support from prominent voices, not proof of consensus
Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko supported the distinction, saying Buterin was “absolutely right that you can’t focus on fees as the product.” MetaLeX attorney Gabriel Shapiro called the thread “a ‘nature is healing’ moment.”
Moonrock Capital founder Simon Dedic described ETH as a store of value as “the biggest bull case for Ethereum” and “the easiest story to sell to institutional capital.” That was Dedic’s investment-oriented interpretation, not evidence of institutional demand or a promised outcome.
The discussion followed the withdrawal, about five weeks earlier, of EIP-8363 from consideration for Hegota, the upgrade scheduled after the delayed Glamsterdam hard fork. That proposal would have burned a growing share of validator rewards as more ETH was staked. Its authors cited risks to “ETH’s role as money” from a high staking ratio; opponents included SharpLink CEO Joseph Chalom and Aave founder Stani Kulechov. The authors planned a separate issuance process running through EthCC in April.
The cultural shift Buterin proposed was therefore less about abandoning a mechanism than changing what it symbolizes: fee burn would remain part of Ethereum, without serving as its defining measure of success.
As a market footnote, ETH traded at $2,236 at 9:23 a.m. ET on the reporting date, down 0.3% on the day, according to The Block.