Morning Minute: Vitalik Recasts ETH as a Store of Value

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors continue slide; BTC flat at $74.2k
• BTC ETF outflows continue, now $2B+ over past 7 sessions
• Coinbase receives final OCC approval for national trust bank charter
• Avalanche will support NYSE tokenized securities platform
• BlackRock says demand for in-kind BTC redemption for IBIT at record highs

🏛️ Vitalik Recasts ETH as a Store of Value

Vitalik Buterin spent Sunday on X telling Ethereum holders to stop valuing ETH as a fee-burning token and start valuing it as a store of value. “We should not feel sad if fee burn is less than 10% of breakeven indefinitely,” he wrote. “The value of ETH comes from elsewhere.”

That elsewhere is stability, which he ties to decentralization, censorship resistance and security. It replaces the ultrasound money pitch, the idea that network usage burns supply faster than staking creates it. The burn has not kept up in years. Through the first nine months of 2026 it offset about 2% of issuance while supply grew 0.64%, mostly because Ethereum’s own rollup roadmap moved activity and fees off the mainnet.

Buterin’s argument is that this is fine, and that chasing the burn would be worse. Maximizing fee revenue means wanting congestion and expensive blockspace. He warned it would turn Ethereum into “a world-scale major corporation” at the cost of what makes it worth using. The burn, he added, was “never a true floor” and came mostly from internal crypto churn like lending and “silly NFT purchases.”