Buterin says Ethereum’s value lies in store of value, not fee burns

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said on X that ETH’s value lies in its role as a store of value rather than in fee burns. He said the large-scale burns seen from 2021 to 2023 were driven by demand within the crypto sector, and the returns from that mechanism fall alongside ETH’s price when the token declines sharply. Maximizing burns, Buterin said, would require protocol-level research and development funding and more active governance, which could undermine censorship resistance and decentralization. By contrast, he said a store-of-value approach aligns with Ethereum’s strengths in decentralization, censorship resistance, open source, privacy and security, or "CROPS." Ethereum, he added, centers on survivability as well as safe storage, privacy protection and censorship resistance. Buterin said Ethereum will keep EIP-1559, which centers on a burn mechanism, but there is no need for disappointment even if the scale of burns declines.