Ethereum Shifts Toward a Store of Value Story as Fee Income Shrinks

Vitalik Buterin now says Ethereum should be judged as a store of value rather than a token that earns its worth by burning fees. He argues that the fee burn idea was weaker than it looked and that chasing it could hurt decentralization and resistance to capture. In his view, trust in an open, private, secure and censorship resistant network, a set of traits he calls CROPS, will count for even more in an age of AI disruption.

Falling Fees Weaken the Ultrasound Money Pitch

After the 2021 fee burn upgrade, ETH briefly turned deflationary and fans started calling it ultrasound money. Since then, the median transaction fee has dropped from 35 cents in January to 3.5 cents in October, even though daily transactions rose by more than half. Smaller fees mean less ETH gets burned, so the old story is hard to defend.

Bitcoin Fans and Ethereum Supporters Clash

Reactions Across Crypto

Dan Held of Held Media said Ethereum is borrowing Bitcoin’s story after its earlier ones failed, and doubted that a changing monetary policy can ever be sound money. Supporters reply that the policy has not changed since the 2022 Merge and that every tweak has cut issuance. Attorney Gabriel Shapiro of MetaLeX backed the shift, while Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko agreed that fees should not be the product.