Amid the trend of projects competing to collect platform fees and burn tokens to maintain holder confidence, Vitalik wants Ethereum to take a different path. Rather than chasing fee burning, he wants $ETH to focus on its role as a store of value, similar to BTC. • Between 2021 and 2023, ETH was burned heavily primarily due to the NFT boom and crypto lending. When the market cooled, ETH burning decreased significantly, making it difficult to use burn volume as a reliable indicator of ETH’s price floor. • Forcing more ETH to be burned would raise transaction fees. Users would suffer, and the network would need deeper intervention to sustain high fees, creating opportunities for interest groups to exert influence. • ETH’s true value lies in Ethereum’s stable, decade-long operation without control by any single organization. Users can securely hold and transfer assets, protect their privacy, and avoid the risk of transaction censorship. => Only then can $ETH become a trustworthy asset for long-term holding. Moreover, a store-of-value asset must be easy to use and easy to exchange for other assets. As bonds and other assets become tokenized on Ethereum, ETH will gain additional utility—such as directly purchasing tokenized bonds with ETH or using ETH as collateral for loans. Developing applications still involves trade-offs—for example, faster block times make it harder for ordinary users to run nodes, increasing centralization risks. But for Vitalik, this cost is far smaller than pursuing maximum fee optimization.