Originally reported by Biteye on November 11, 2026, at 11:03 a.m. UTC+8.
In a November 8 post on X, Vitalik Buterin questioned whether fee burns provide a reliable valuation floor for ETH. Biteye’s analysis uses that argument to compare how seven networks issue, burn or release tokens. Its central distinction is that a falling burn rate does not, by itself, measure a network’s usefulness—or settle the value of its native asset.
Different mechanisms, different supply effects
According to Biteye, BTC’s current 3.125 BTC block reward implies roughly 164,300 new BTC a year, or about 0.82% annual supply inflation, assuming one block every ten minutes. ETH supply has grown about 1.37% since the 2022 Merge; over the 30 days preceding the article, EIP-1559 burns offset only about 3.2% of new issuance.
Solana’s inflation schedule began at 8% annually, declines by 15% each year and targets 1.5% in the long run. Biteye notes that, following implementation of SIMD-0096, all priority fees go to validators while only 50% of base fees are burned. BNB, by contrast, has no continuing issuance and reduces supply through quarterly Auto-Burn and BEP-95 fee burns, toward a target supply of 100 million BNB.
The remaining cases show why a simple burn comparison can mislead. TRON issues TRX as block rewards and burns fees paid for Energy and Bandwidth, but users can also obtain those resources through staking or rental; more USDT transfers therefore need not mean proportionally more burns. AVAX has a 720 million-token supply cap and burns X-, C- and P-Chain fees, while still issuing validator rewards. SUI has a fixed 10 billion-token supply, with circulating supply chiefly affected by unlocks. Its Storage Fund locks some fees, but the portion not returned when data is deleted is not a permanent burn.
What a burn-based valuation leaves out
Biteye recounts a model discussed by Buterin: annual dollar value burned divided by a discount rate. At $1 billion in steady annual burns and a 4% rate, the result would be $25 billion. But the steady-burn assumption is the problem. Biteye reports that Ethereum burned roughly 1.48 million ETH, worth about $3.6 billion, in 2022; through November 8, 2026, it had burned about 19,200 ETH, worth roughly $43 million, that year. Annualizing the latter to $50 million would yield $1.25 billion under the same model, versus an ETH market capitalization of about $270 billion at the time. These are the article’s reported figures and illustrative calculation, not an independently validated valuation dataset.
Buterin still supported retaining EIP-1559, according to Biteye. His objection was to treating burns—often driven by speculative activity—as a dependable floor, or pursuing higher fees to sustain them at the expense of decentralization and long-term development. He instead emphasized decentralization, censorship resistance, open source, privacy and security. Whether those properties, or ETH’s use as collateral, a medium of exchange and a native financial asset, warrant a durable monetary premium remains a separate question that fee-burn arithmetic cannot answer.
