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Today’s top news:

🏛️ 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.”

Supporters are already building out the new frame. Ethlabs co-founder Binji Pande calls ETH a future-proof store of value and argues it beats Bitcoin on quantum and AI risk, citing eleven years of trading history and an Ethereum Foundation that holds under 0.2% of supply. Julian Ma of Ethlabs makes the related case that Ethereum’s security culture positions it as a programmable store of value as AI pressures cryptography.

Here’s the problem with the store-of-value pitch, though. Store of value is Bitcoin’s category, and Bitcoin holds it with a hard cap, more Lindy, deeper ETF plumbing and a corporate treasury bid ETH is only starting to build. And now Zcash is creeping in as the privacy store of value play. ETH hasn’t historically been considered a store of value play. It remains to be seen if Vitalik can successfully cast this pitch…

ETH price on November 10, 4:59PM UTC

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