Originally reported by Biteye on November 11, 2026, at 11:03 a.m. UTC+8.
In a November 8 post on X, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin questioned whether transaction-fee burns provide a reliable valuation floor for ETH. As Biteye reported, he argued that much of the fee revenue behind earlier high burn rates came from speculation within crypto markets and could shrink when that activity slows. Buterin still supported retaining EIP-1559, the mechanism that burns Ethereum’s base fees. In his view, even a prolonged period in which burns offset less than 10% of new issuance would not justify pursuing higher fees at the expense of decentralization and long-term development.
Issuance and burns differ across chains
Biteye compared several networks to show why a single burn-based measure is difficult to apply:
- Bitcoin: Its supply cap is approximately 21 million BTC. At a reward of 3.125 BTC per block and an assumed ten-minute average block interval, Biteye estimated annual issuance at roughly 164,300 BTC, or 0.82% of supply.
- Ethereum: Supply had grown about 1.37% since the 2022 Merge, according to the article. Over the 30 days preceding its report, burns offset only about 3.2% of new issuance.
- Solana: Its initial annual inflation rate of 8% is designed to decline by 15% each year toward a long-term target of 1.5%. Biteye said burns offset about 23% of issuance in January 2025. Following the implementation of SIMD-0096, priority fees went entirely to validators, while 50% of base fees continued to be burned; daily burns at one point fell to roughly 700 SOL.
- BNB: Rather than relying on continuing issuance, BNB reduces supply through quarterly Auto-Burn events and BEP-95 fee burns, toward a target supply of 100 million. Biteye put the first four quarterly burns of 2026 at approximately 6.2 million BNB.
- TRX: TRON issues block rewards and burns fees paid for network resources. Users can also obtain those resources by staking or renting them, so more USDT transfers do not necessarily mean proportionately more TRX burned.
- AVAX and SUI: AVAX has a 720 million token cap and burns fees on its X, C and P chains, but Biteye said cumulative burns of about 5.18 million AVAX as of early November 2026 had not offset issuance. SUI has a fixed supply of 10 billion; circulation can rise through unlocks, while tokens held in its Storage Fund are not permanently burned.
What a burn-based calculation leaves out
Biteye discussed a simplified model that divides the annual value of burned tokens by a discount rate. At a 4% rate, a steady $1 billion in annual burns would imply a $25 billion valuation. But the article described the model as unreliable: it estimated that Ethereum burned about 1.48 million ETH, worth $3.6 billion, in 2022, compared with roughly 19,200 ETH, worth $43 million, from the start of 2026 through November 8. Annualizing the latter figure to about $50 million would produce a model value near $1.25 billion, versus an ETH market capitalization of approximately $270 billion at the time.
That gap does not establish a different valuation for ETH. As the article noted, fees vary with activity, and economic value can also reach validators or resource providers rather than appear as token burns. Buterin instead emphasized decentralization, censorship resistance, open source, privacy and security as potential sources of Ethereum’s long-term value. Whether those qualities—and ETH’s uses as collateral, a medium of exchange and a native asset for on-chain finance—justify a monetary premium remains a question the burn figures alone cannot answer.