Vitalik Buterin Reframes Ethereum’s ETH Value Story Around Stability

Ethereum’s “ultrasound money” pitch depends on a variable the network can’t guarantee: enough transaction fees to burn more ETH than it issues. Vitalik Buterin is urging the community to build ETH’s long-term value story around a different asset: confidence in Ethereum as dependable, decentralized infrastructure. That shift asks supporters to judge the network by what it enables and how it behaves, rather than by whether its fee mechanism produces a particular result.

In a Sunday morning post on X, the Ethereum co-creator argued that fee burns are a narrow measure of the network’s success. The 2021 EIP-1559 upgrade introduced the burning of part of transaction fees, helping fuel the idea that ETH could grow scarcer over time. But burns haven’t consistently exceeded new issuance, and Buterin said they may remain far below the level needed to offset it. That distinction matters: a mechanism can reduce supply at the margin without reliably making the total supply shrink.

“We should not feel sad” even if fee burns stay below 10% of what would be needed to offset issuance indefinitely, he wrote. “The value of ETH comes from elsewhere.” The statement is both a defense of Ethereum’s broader purpose and a concession that one popular measure may not deliver the outcome some holders expected.

Fee targets can pull Ethereum off course

Buterin’s argument is also about what Ethereum might sacrifice if it treats burning as a primary goal. A network designed to maximize fee destruction could face pressure to make choices that conflict with decentralization and censorship resistance. For him, those qualities are part of Ethereum’s core proposition, not secondary benefits to trade away for a stronger token-supply story. The concern is that optimizing for one visible metric can narrow the discussion of what the network is meant to protect.

He pointed instead to decentralization and CROPS: censorship resistance, open source, privacy and security. These properties, he argued, offer a steadier basis for ETH’s long-term appeal than a supply narrative tied to transaction volumes and fee levels. They matter to people and institutions that hold assets on Ethereum and need infrastructure they can rely on without depending on a centralized intermediary. If you’re working in this space, the test is whether those promises hold up in the ordinary use of the network, not simply whether they make a persuasive slogan.

That’s a clear departure from the “ultrasound money” thesis, which became popular with ETH investors during the 2021 bull run. The pitch focused on permanently removing a share of transaction fees from circulation, potentially making ETH deflationary. But if fee burns fluctuate with network activity, scarcity alone can’t carry the whole case for the asset. The numbers here are underwhelming for anyone who treated deflation as a dependable outcome, even if the burn mechanism still has a role.

Stability as a store-of-value argument

Buterin sees reliability as increasingly valuable as technology and economic activity change. “In the era of AI disruption, stability will be highly valued,” he wrote. His point is that Ethereum’s value may come from preserving trust in financial infrastructure through that disruption, rather than from engineering a particular token-supply outcome. That’s a broader claim, and it depends on users seeing the network’s operating qualities as worth relying on over time.

That framing makes the store-of-value case less about short-term scarcity and more about whether Ethereum can maintain the features that make it dependable. It also shifts the conversation toward how the network serves users over time—an argument that requires Ethereum to keep delivering on its security, openness and resistance to control. Here’s the thing: those are qualities that can support confidence, but they don’t automatically guarantee demand for ETH. The link between useful infrastructure and the value of its associated asset still has to be made.

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko voiced a related skepticism about making fees the product. He called that idea “absolutely meaningless” and argued that blockchain networks should deliver tangible value to users instead of focusing on how much they charge to include transactions in a block. His comment points to a wider question for networks: fees can show that people are using a system, but a high fee total isn’t, by itself, proof that the system is serving users well.

What the argument leaves unresolved

For Ethereum, the practical test is whether its network qualities can support durable demand for ETH even when fee burns fall short of issuance. Buterin’s case puts that question ahead of the burn rate. It also leaves open how supporters should assess progress: decentralization, privacy and security are harder to reduce to a single figure than net issuance, and their value is often clearest when users can depend on them in practice.

And yet, moving the discussion away from burn targets may be useful if it keeps the network’s priorities in view. A token-supply story can be simple to repeat; infrastructure quality is harder to summarize and has to be demonstrated over time. (And this is the part most people overlook.) Reliability isn’t merely a reassuring description. It’s a claim Ethereum has to keep earning through the choices it makes.

That’s the implication for ETH holders and users: the case Buterin is making rests on confidence in Ethereum’s role, not a promise that fee burns will outpace issuance. If that confidence proves durable, a shortfall in burns needn’t settle the argument about the network’s value. If it doesn’t, pointing to desirable principles won’t answer the harder question of why people will continue to rely on Ethereum. A different thesis, then, but still one that has to be tested.