Vitalik Buterin Backs Ethereum (ETH) Store-of-Value Case as 2026 Burn Slumps to 19,200

Buterin Puts Store of Value Above Fee Burns

Ethereum (ETH) price sits near $2,104, and the token's persistent underperformance against Bitcoin has revived a valuation fight that Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin rejoined on November 8 with a post on X: judge ETH as a store of value, not as a deflationary asset assembled from fee burns. The relative numbers frame why. The ETH/BTC ratio fell from 0.03020 on October 10 to 0.02840 on November 9, a decline of roughly 5.96%, so a holder pairing the two assets lost ground even before absolute prices are counted. Market data put ETH at about $2,116 earlier on Tuesday, down 0.97% over 24 hours, and live pricing has drifted slightly lower since.

The dispute turns on plumbing the Ethereum ecosystem adopted years ago. EIP-1559, activated in 2021, permanently burns part of every transaction fee. The Merge followed in 2022, shifting consensus to proof of stake and cutting new issuance. Together the two changes built the “ultra sound money” thesis: heavier network use would shrink supply and lift the token. The Layer 2 scaling road map severed that link in practice. As activity migrated to rollups, base-layer fees fell and burns collapsed with them: on-chain records show about 1.48 million Ethereum (ETH) burned in 2022 against roughly 19,200 ETH across 2026 through early November, a gap of nearly two orders of magnitude.

Buterin went after the older logic on its own terms. A large share of past fee revenue came from speculative churn in NFT and digital-asset markets, which he does not treat as durable demand for the chain. His stated position is that EIP-1559 stays, and that it would not matter even if burns ran indefinitely below 10% of the level needed to offset issuance. Maximizing fee revenue, he argued, would require high gas fees and aggressive protocol intervention that would damage decentralization. Instead, security, privacy, censorship resistance and open-source development, the CROPS principles he named, should carry the token's long-term store-of-value case.

Rynes Separates Network Success From ETH Returns

Zach Rynes, Chainlink's community liaison, delivered the sharpest rebuttal in a November 8 post on X. His core claim is that Ethereum (ETH) succeeding as a network and ETH holders capturing value are two different investment theses. The Layer 2-centered strategy, in his telling, handed the most lucrative activity, congestion fees and MEV, to rollups, applications and middleware, while the base chain optimized for the least valuable work: settlement and data availability. He wrote that L1 revenue has collapsed by 99% over recent years, and that this collapse is what forced the narrative shift toward store of value in the first place.

@ChainLinkGod · X post

A November 8 post on X.

View on X

Tokenization is where he sees the split most clearly. Institutions can use Ethereum's security and credible neutrality to issue tokenized equities and treasuries without ever holding ETH, and onchain markets increasingly price against fiat-backed stablecoins. Gas abstraction, now spreading across wallets, means users may not need to acquire ETH at all; someone still pays the underlying fee, but that is a revenue argument, not a value-capture one. Every additional asset issued on the chain competes for the same capital, in his words a net PvP dynamic. Our separate coverage tracked the Ethereum tokenized treasury balance down 52% from its May peak to $4.31B, a reading that fits his warning that onchain credit demand has cooled.

Supply mechanics sharpen the contrast. Bitcoin caps issuance at 21 million coins, while Ethereum sets no maximum supply: new ETH enters through staking rewards, and total supply shrinks only in periods when burns exceed issuance. Selling scarcity gets harder when burns are this small. Rynes added that Bitcoin has largely won the non-sovereign store-of-value contest, leaving ETH, which he noted adjusts its monetary policy repeatedly, a “second best crypto SoV” story at best. Both sides leave one question open: how growth in real-world assets and stablecoin volume converts into ETH demand, with Bitcoin's store-of-value market still the benchmark.

Support at $2,042, Resistance at $2,165

The floor matters most here. COINOTAG's composite scoring marks $2,042 as the strongest support under the market at 92/100, with resistance at $2,165 scored 87/100, about 2.9% above spot. Momentum readings are weak: RSI at 32, a bearish MACD signal and a confirmed downtrend, and readers can follow the full Ethereum technical analysis on our dedicated page. Derivatives positioning adds tension: the long/short account ratio stands at 4.35, 81.3% of accounts long, against a funding rate of just 0.0027%. Longs are crowded into a falling tape, and a daily close under $2,042 would test that conviction. The larger distance is still relative: at 0.0284, the ETH/BTC ratio sits 5.96% below its October 10 print, and the store-of-value debate now decides who has to close it.