Vitalik Buterin wants ETH valued as a store of value, which puts Ethereum in the space where Bitcoin's pitch to traditional finance is strongest. ETH prices and ETF flows have fallen, and the shift may leave Wall Street unsure what ether represents.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said earlier this week that 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. According to Buterin, optimizing Ethereum for that role is aligned with decentralization and CROPS, meaning censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and security.
ETH treasury leaders cheer the pivot
Reactions were mixed even among Ethereum supporters, 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.
The narrative has changed before. Making the store-of-value story mainstream would follow the failed "ultrasound money" campaign and earlier attempts to frame ETH as "digital oil" next to bitcoin's "digital gold."
Prices and fund flows move the other way
ETH briefly hit a record of around $4,946 in Aug. 2025, and it now trades about 58% below that peak.
Flows into ETH exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have trended downward since Oct. 2025, as have flows into bitcoin ETFs. Over that period, cumulative flows into ETH ETFs dropped 23%, compared with a 12% decline for BTC ETFs. At the time of writing, BTC is down 30% over the past year, while ETH is down 41%.
No agreed definition of store of value
However, the pitch faces a definitional problem. The article notes that "store of value" has no universally agreed definition, and many assets considered stores of value have failed. Buterin names survival as the first and most important of his store-of-value metrics.
About half of the arguments Buterin cites for ETH as a store of value are already attributed to BTC. Those include survival, slow change, low protocol politics, easy self-custody, and running a node on modest hardware.
Based on the prices John Pfeffer cited in a Dec. 2017 paper, bitcoin is up about 5.7x, while ether is up less than 3x.
Source: Bitcoin News
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