Earlier this week, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that the case for valuing $ETH as a fee-burning token “never was as strong as it seemed,” and that it should instead be valued as a store of value (SoV).
According to Buterin, optimizing Ethereum as a store of value “is aligned with decentralization and CROPS,” or censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and security.
Upgraded Ethereum Narratives
The “$ETH as a store of value” story has been around for years, but making it mainstream now would follow the failed “ultrasound money” campaign and earlier efforts to frame the asset as “digital oil” alongside bitcoin’s “digital gold.”
Reactions to this pivot were mixed, even among Ethereans, but leaders of $ETH treasury companies welcomed the change. Bitmine Chairman Tom Lee, whose company holds about 6 million $ETH, called Buterin’s store-of-value comments “a seismic shift” that validates the company’s strategy. Joseph Lubin, who controls Consensys and chairs $ETH treasury firm Sharplink, argued that while “gold and $BTC are high-powered money and excellent stores of value, $ETH goes further.”
Etherealize, which was founded after Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation gave co-founder Vivek Raman a 2024 grant to persuade Wall Street executives of Ethereum’s merits, shared a post about $ETH as a programmable store of value. Raman retweeted Buterin’s post but did not join the discussion.
Etherealize has already been pitching the store-of-value narrative to Wall Street. In Jan. 2025, it presented $ETH as “a diversified complement to Bitcoin” because it’s “a store of value with cash flow,” Etherealize also compared $ETH to oil. In April 2026, the company essentially argued that $ETH could replace bitcoin by capturing the combined monetary premium of gold and $BTC.
If Buterin’s emphasis on $ETH as a store of value gains traction, Wall Street might need to update its understanding of the asset, based on his explanation. If investors are convinced, they might also need to reevaluate their $BTC positions.
The Number Is Down
Etherealize’s pitches made increasingly ambitious claims about $ETH. The price briefly reached a record of around $4,946 in Aug. 2025, but now trades about 58% below that peak.
If flows into $ETH exchange-traded funds (ETFs) indicate Wall Street’s interest in ether, those flows, measured in U.S. dollars, have been trending downward since Oct. 2025, as have flows into bitcoin ETFs. Over the same period, cumulative flows into $ETH ETFs fell 23%, compared with a 12% decline for $BTC ETFs.
Falling prices for both assets also affected those flows. At the time of writing, $BTC is down 30% over the past year, while $ETH is down 41%.
Buterin Dismissed Earlier Arguments
Wall Street might be left scratching its head not only because the narrative has changed again, but also because of the reasoning behind the change. Etherealize and Buterin appear to have reached similar conclusions for somewhat different reasons.
For example, Etherealize claimed that fee burns direct value from all Ethereum activity to $ETH and that $ETH is “potentially deflationary,” Buterin now downplays the importance of burns. His reasoning also weakens Etherealize’s response to an argument made by Bitcoiner John Pfeffer in 2017: paying stakers with new issuance transfers value from holders who do not stake to those who do.
Earlier this year, Etherealize rejected the objection that staking yield is simply inflation, arguing that burns offset issuance and that a meaningful share of the yield comes from transaction fees. If burns remain small and fees prove unreliable, as Buterin now says, then most staking yield comes from new issuance, confirming Pfeffer’s point. This negatively affects holders who do not stake but benefits treasury firms such as Bitmine, which stakes around 84% of its $ETH. On Monday, the firm said it expects to earn $309 million worth of $ETH annually at current yields.
Etherealize also criticized Bitcoin, saying it “chose ossification because it values near-term stability more than long-term viability.” Buterin now calls for “at least partial ossification” in Ethereum, too, once its core is complete.
What Is a Store of Value? There Is No Single Answer
One of the biggest challenges for advocates of the store-of-value narrative in both the Bitcoin and Ethereum camps is that “store of value” has no universally agreed definition, and many assets considered stores of value have failed. For example, there is no agreement on how long an asset must retain its value or how far it can fall and still qualify as a store of value.
According to Buterin, “the first and most important SoV-ish metric” is “to survive.” He lists other metrics, but survival alone might not be very encouraging to people seeking to protect their capital: the crypto space is full of altcoins that have crashed more than 90% and continued to “survive” for years.
History offers examples of assets losing value. Wampum lost its value in the 17th century after people found a cheaper way to produce it. Silver also faced problems when its use in coinage was suspended, and the U.S. demonetized it in the 19th century. Today, both Etherealize and some bitcoiners use silver as an analogy when discussing the competing asset, as they all seek the “digital gold” title.
Gold might not be the best historical comparison, either, as it has experienced multi-decade, double-digit drawdowns. Meanwhile, as “digital gold” is now mostly associated with bitcoin, the asset is also known for its sharp, though decreasing, volatility.
The Clash Between Two Nearly Identical Stories
If the most prominent Ethereans begin promoting the “$ETH is SoV” narrative, winning over traditional Wall Street investors could be an uphill battle:
- Ethereum’s previous attempts to distinguish itself from Bitcoin have seemingly failed to work as expected.
- Ethereum may now be moving into the store-of-value narrative, a space dominated by Bitcoin among crypto assets.
- About half of the arguments Buterin cites for $ETH as an SoV, including survival, slow change, low protocol politics, easy self-custody and the ability to run a node on modest hardware, are already attributed to $BTC.
- Both the Ethereum and Bitcoin camps have repeatedly changed their pitches to appeal to investors, but Bitcoin’s SoV story has remained dominant.
Another Attempt to Improve on Bitcoin’s Story
Some Ethereum thought leaders now say the blockchain offers all of Bitcoin’s main benefits, plus something extra. For example, one update to Buterin’s framing described $ETH as “a programmable store of value.” This echoes the “ultrasound money” campaign, which similarly borrowed Bitcoin’s “sound money” narrative and tried to show that $ETH was even better money. The effort did not succeed.
Even David Hoffman, a top Ethereum influencer and Bankless co-founder, sold all his $ETH in May 2026. He wrote that the “$ETH is money” thesis had played out rather than failed, and that he remained bullish on the network, but noted that he does think that “only a marginal amount of that success will be reflected in $ETH.”
In response to Buterin’s post, Hoffman said: “The timing of this whole thing makes it feel like it’s coming from a place of weakness, not strength.” In the same thread, he added: “My thought is that the universe/[context]/environment that we live is not suited to let $ETH as an asset thrive.”
He also offered a more bullish view: “Ethereum best path [is] forwards. If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
Simpler, but More Complicated
On one hand, Buterin’s suggestion to value $ETH as a SoV makes the pitch simpler and clearer. But the context, including its similarities to bitcoin and the repeated changes in narrative, might make the pitch more complicated.
For now, Bitcoin seemingly remains the leading SoV among crypto assets for most investors. Only a minority are likely to examine each network more closely, considering how decentralized they really are, how well prepared they are for post-quantum cryptography, which has the stronger security model, their technical differences and capabilities, adoption challenges, and developments in the pipeline for both ecosystems.
History shows there is no universal agreement on any of these issues. Investors are left with their beliefs rather than undeniable arguments for investing in either asset.
3x SoV vs. 5.7x SoV
In his Dec. 2017 paper, “An (Institutional) Investor’s Take on Cryptoassets,” John Pfeffer argued that there was a “possibility that $ETH replaces bitcoin and becomes the dominant non-sovereign monetary store of value simply on pure store-of-value merits,” but that “an objective observer would give bitcoin significantly higher odds than $ETH of becoming such a store of value.”
Nine years later, $BTC has preserved and increased its value better than $ETH. Using the prices Pfeffer cited in the paper, about $13,000 per bitcoin and $700 per ether, bitcoin has risen about 5.7x, while ether has risen less than 3x. The storytelling contest continues.
