Originally reported by Biteye on November 11, 2026, at 11:03 a.m. UTC+8.
Ethereum’s “ultrasound money” narrative links network activity to ETH’s supply: more transactions generate more fees, and EIP-1559 burns the base fee. In a November 8 X post discussed by Biteye, Vitalik Buterin argued that fee burning is not a reliable valuation floor. Much of the historically high fee revenue came from speculation within crypto, he said, and could shrink when that activity subsides.
Buterin still supported keeping EIP-1559. In his view, it would not be a problem if burns remained below 10% of new issuance over the long term; pursuing higher fees simply to increase burns could instead harm Ethereum’s decentralization and development.
Supply mechanics differ across chains
Biteye’s comparison shows why “more usage means more burn” is not a universal rule:
- BTC: Supply is capped at about 21 million. At a 3.125 BTC block reward and an average of one block every ten minutes, Biteye estimated roughly 164,300 new BTC a year, or annual supply inflation of about 0.82%.
- ETH: Biteye put cumulative supply growth since the 2022 Merge at about 1.37%. In the 30 days preceding its report, burns offset only about 3.2% of new issuance, amid lower gas fees and wider L2 use.
- SOL: Solana’s initial annual inflation rate was 8%, declining by 15% each year toward a long-term target of 1.5%. Biteye reported that burns exceeded 10,000 SOL on some days during the 2024 meme-token boom and offset about 23% of new issuance in January 2025. After SIMD-0096 directed all priority fees to validators while retaining the burn of 50% of base fees, daily burns at one point fell to about 700 SOL.
- BNB: Rather than relying on continuing issuance, BNB reduces supply through quarterly Auto-Burn and BEP-95 gas-fee burns, toward a target of 100 million BNB. Biteye reported about 6.2 million BNB burned across the first four quarterly burns of 2026. Auto-Burn depends on price and block production; BEP-95 burns a portion of network fees.
- TRX: TRON issues block rewards and burns fees paid for Energy and Bandwidth. Because users can also obtain those resources by staking or renting them, more USDT transfers do not necessarily mean proportionately more TRX burned.
- AVAX: Supply is capped at 720 million, while validator rewards add coins and fees on the primary network’s X, C and P chains are burned. As of early November 2026, Biteye reported about 474 million AVAX minted, including roughly 114 million in staking rewards, against about 5.18 million burned.
- SUI: Total supply is fixed at 10 billion; unlocks, rather than unlimited issuance, are the key source of additional circulating supply. Its Storage Fund holds part of storage fees and uses staking returns to compensate validators. Fees left in the fund after data deletion restrict freely circulating supply but are not permanently burned.
What a burn-based valuation misses
Biteye revisited a simple model: divide the annual dollar value of burns by a discount rate. At $1 billion burned each year and a 4% rate, it produces a theoretical valuation of $25 billion. The calculation assumes that the burn rate is durable—precisely the assumption Buterin questioned.
For ETH, Biteye reported about 1.48 million ETH burned in 2022, worth roughly $3.6 billion. From the start of 2026 through November 8, it put the total at about 19,200 ETH, worth roughly $43 million. Annualizing the latter figure to approximately $50 million and applying the same 4% rate yields $1.25 billion, versus an ETH market capitalization of about $270 billion at the time—a gap of more than 200 times. That gap illustrates the model’s limits; it is not, by itself, a measure of what ETH should be worth.
Fees also reach participants through routes other than burns: Solana priority fees go to validators, for example, while TRON resource rentals can benefit stakers. Burn figures capture one form of value distribution, not every chain’s economics.
Buterin instead emphasized Ethereum’s decentralization, censorship resistance, open-source nature, privacy and security. He suggested that systems able to operate over the long term without control by a single party could become more valuable as AI develops. Whether those qualities support a monetary premium is a separate question. Biteye noted both potential demand for ETH as on-chain collateral, a medium of exchange and a native asset for financial infrastructure, and the challenge of assessing long-term trust in an asset without a fixed supply cap whose issuance rules can change through protocol upgrades.
The unresolved issue is not whether burns can be counted—they can—but how much they explain when fees decline or economic activity benefits participants without reducing token supply.