"ETH Burning Can't Keep Up with Issuance: Is Vitalik Starting to Talk About Value Storage?" On November 8th, Vitalik posted a long thread on X, re-discussing the source of ETH's value. In the past, Ethereum has been associated with the narrative of Ultrasound Money: active ecosystems drive up gas consumption, and continuous burning of transaction fees can not only offset inflation but even push ETH into deflation. However, Vitalik believes that transaction fee burning is never a reliable valuation floor. This is because a large portion of transaction fees in the past came from speculative activities within the crypto market; once the market declines, burning revenue will shrink accordingly. He still supports retaining EIP-1559, but even if the amount burned in the future is consistently less than 10% of the new issuance, there's no need to regret it. Deliberately pursuing higher transaction fees to maintain high burning rates could actually harm Ethereum's decentralization and long-term development. This also raises a question: if the logic of "the more prosperous the application, the more tokens burned, the more valuable the token" is no longer reliable, then what can support the valuation of public chain tokens that are continuously issued every year? How much new tokens are issued and how much are burned annually on major public blockchains? Most PoS public blockchains need to issue tokens to reward validators, while simultaneously reducing supply through transaction fees. Different issuance and burning rules determine the actual supply changes of each public blockchain. 1. BTC: Halving every four years, inflation rate continuously declining. BTC has the simplest supply rules, with a total supply cap of approximately 21 million tokens. Currently, each block rewards 3.125 BTC. Assuming an average block time of one ten minutes, approximately 164,300 new tokens are issued annually, resulting in an annualized supply inflation rate of approximately 0.82%. 2. ETH: Supply growth has been very low since the merger, but has recently accelerated again. After The Merge in 2022, the issuance of new ETH tokens decreased significantly, with a cumulative supply growth of approximately 1.37% since the merger. EIP-1559 burned all base transaction fees, but with the widespread adoption of L2 and declining gas fees, the amount burned in the last 30 days only offset about 3.2% of new issuance, challenging the deflationary narrative of the past. 3. SOL: Continuously issued, but the inflation rate will gradually decrease. Solana's initial annual inflation rate was 8%, decreasing by 15% annually, with a long-term target of 1.5%. During the 2024 meme boom, the daily burning amount once exceeded 10,000 SOL; in January 2025, the burning amount offset about 23% of new issuance. However, after the implementation of SIMD-0096, all priority fees went to validators, with only 50% of the base transaction fees burned. The daily burning amount subsequently dropped to about 700 SOL. 4. BNB: Does not rely on continuous issuance, but reduces the total supply through burning. BNB has not seen continuous issuance; its supply is reduced through quarterly Auto-Burn and BEP-95 real-time gas burning, with a target total supply of 100 million. Approximately 6.2 million BNB will be burned in the first four quarters of 2026. Auto-Burn determines the amount burned based on the coin price and block count, while BEP-95 burns a portion of network transaction fees. 5. TRX: The more active the stablecoin transactions, the more likely it is to be burned. TRON issues TRX through block rewards and simultaneously burns Energy and Bandwidth resource fees paid by users. However, users can also obtain resources through staking or leasing. Therefore, even if USDT transaction volume increases, the amount of TRX burned may not increase proportionally. 6. AVAX: It has both a supply cap and transaction fee burning. AVAX has a total supply cap of 720 million coins. New issuance rewards validators, while all transaction fees from the mainnet X, C, and P chains are burned. As of early November 2026, approximately 474 million tokens had been minted, of which approximately 114 million were staking rewards, and approximately 5.18 million tokens had been burned, still insufficient to offset the new issuance. 7. SUI: There is no unlimited issuance; the real focus is on unlocking. The total supply of SUI is fixed at 10 billion tokens, with the circulating supply increasing primarily as tokens are unlocked. Its Storage Fund locks a portion of storage fees, compensating validators through staking rewards. Deleting data allows for the recovery of most fees; the unrecovered portion remains in the fund, reducing the free-circulating supply, but not permanently burning the tokens. How much is a public chain actually worth based on the amount of tokens burned? In the discussion, Vitalik reviewed a once-popular "burn valuation" model: Token Valuation = Annual Burn Amount ÷ Discount Rate Assuming a public chain stably burns $1 billion worth of tokens annually, with a 4% discount rate, the theoretical valuation is approximately $25 billion. However, Vitalik immediately pointed out that this so-called "valuation bottom" is unreliable. Taking Ethereum (ETH) as an example, in 2022, Ethereum burned approximately 1.48 million ETH, worth about $3.6 billion; while by November 8, 2026, the cumulative burned amount was only about 19,200 ETH, worth about $43 million. If we simply annualize this year's burned amount to about $50 million, and calculate using the same discount rate, the theoretical valuation is only about $1.25 billion, while ETH's market capitalization during the same period is about $270 billion. The difference is more than 200 times, which exposes the limitations of the model itself. Other public chains also face similar valuation problems. 1. Transaction fee revenue is unstable. In the past, high-value burns mainly came from speculative activities such as NFTs. As the market cools down, revenue also declines, making it difficult to consider it a long-term stable cash flow. 2. Burning is just one way of distributing value in a public chain. SOL's priority fees flow to validators, and TRX's resource rentals may become stakers' earnings; these economic values are not entirely reflected in token burning. Therefore, while the amount burned can measure some value capture, it cannot serve as a unified valuation standard for all public chains. From Fee Burning to Value Storage: Is ETH's Valuation Logic Changing? If fee burning cannot serve as a reliable valuation basis, where else can ETH's long-term value come from? Vitalik prioritizes Ethereum's decentralization, censorship resistance, open-source nature, privacy, and security. He specifically mentioned that in an era of rapid AI development, systems that can operate stably for a long time and are not controlled by a single entity may become even more valuable. However, there are also many criticisms: 1. ETH already has a market capitalization of hundreds of billions of dollars, which obviously cannot be fully explained by fee revenue. Its demand as an on-chain collateral asset, medium of exchange, and native asset of financial infrastructure may itself create a currency premium. 2. ETH does not have a fixed supply ceiling; the issuance rules can be adjusted through protocol upgrades. To compete with Bitcoin in the value store market, ETH must answer the question: what justifies the same long-term trust in terms of supply rules and monetary policy? Transaction fee burning is at least calculable, but the monetary premium derived from value storage is difficult to value with a unified standard. Narratives can change, but the market ultimately needs a reason to explain why it's willing to hold ETH long-term. In Conclusion For the past few years, cryptocurrencies have pursued higher transaction volumes, lower fees, and a more thriving on-chain ecosystem. However, as fees decrease and burning becomes insufficient to support valuations, public chains are beginning to rethink the value source of their native tokens. Vitalik's renewed focus on value storage may signal a shift in the valuation logic of public chains. But as more and more public chains emphasize scarcity, security, and long-term consensus, is the market truly willing to pay a monetary premium similar to Bitcoin's? And if the application scale of public chains grows tenfold in the future, while transaction fee revenue continues to decline, what will sustain the value of native tokens?