Vitalik Buterin Moves On From ‘Ultrasound Money,’ Says ETH’s Value Is Stability
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has called for a shift in how ETH is valued, moving away from its branding as a fee-burning token toward positioning it as a store of value.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wants people to stop valuing ETH as a fee-burning token and start treating it as a store of value, arguing that the burn was never as strong as it seemed. This represents a notable shift in messaging from the Ethereum community, after ETH was branded as ultrasound money in 2021 when the network began burning a portion of transaction fees.
Buterin tweeted that the value of ETH comes from stability, which derives from Ethereum being decentralized, resistant to censorship, and having strong security. We should not feel sad if fee burn is < 10% of breakeven indefinitely; the value of ETH comes from elsewhere, he stated.
Fee Burn Limitations
Those in favor of the fee-burning structure argued that fees gave ETH a price floor, similar to how a company's stock is backed by revenue. From 2021 to 2023, Ethereum burned millions of ETH annually, but Buterin claimed this was never a true floor since most burns came from internal crypto uses like lending and NFT purchases.
Connor Howe, co-founder and CEO of infrastructure provider Enso, noted that Ethereum's layer-2 expansion has weakened the fee-burning argument, as activity has moved to layer-2s where users pay almost nothing to settle transactions. Optimizing for fee burning would require higher gas prices, which no one wants.
If we decide we actually want to optimize ETH for burning fees to justify a present-day ~$270B market cap, then Ethereum would essentially be functioning as a world-scale major corporation.
Store of Value
A store of value is an asset that maintains its worth over time, with gold historically serving as the ultimate example and Bitcoin being pitched as digital gold. Binji Pande, founding member of Ethlabs, argues that both fall short compared to Ethereum.
Pande contends that gold lacks portability in our globalized world, while Bitcoin isn't future-proof against emerging AI and quantum threats. Ethereum, however, has been preparing for these threats, with the Ethereum Foundation forming a post-quantum team in January and researchers debating AI-powered threats.
Future-Proof Position
Pande emphasizes that ETH is best positioned as a future-proof store of value due to its censorship resistance, great distribution, and centrality to growing sectors like tokenization, stablecoins, and DeFi. He also claims newer assets can't compete with ETH as a store of value because there's no way to verify they're fairly distributed.
The Ethereum Foundation owns less than 0.2% of ETH, and the token has traded for 11 years, giving it credibility. Trying to distribute or mine a new asset as a SoV in the lord's 2026 is like trying to hide a sack of meat in a sea of piranhas, Pande said. It can and WILL get centralized.
Not everyone thinks Ethereum's leadership moved quickly enough. Howe stated that the Ethereum Foundation needs to start to actually listen and look at the applications building on top of their network and that it took too long for Buterin to voice this perspective.
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