How Buterin Complicates Ethereum’s Wall Street Pitch by Aiming at Bitcoin

Earlier this week, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said 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 (SoV).

According to Buterin, optimizing Ethereum as a store of value “is aligned with decentralization and CROPS,” or censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and security.

Upgraded Ethereum Narratives

While the “ETH as a store of value” story has been around for years, making it mainstream now would follow the failed “ultrasound money” campaign and previous attempts to frame the asset as “digital oil” alongside bitcoin’s “digital gold.”

While reactions to this pivot were mixed even among Ethereans, leaders of ETH treasury companies cheered 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. Joseph Lubin, who controls Consensys and chairs ETH treasury firm Sharplink, argued that while “gold and BTC are high-powered money and excellent stores of value, ETH goes further.”

Meanwhile, Etherealize, founded after Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation gave co-founder Vivek Raman a 2024 grant to persuade Wall Street executives of Ethereum’s merits, shared a post about ETH being a programmable store of value. Raman retweeted Buterin’s post, but didn’t join the discussion.

The company has already been selling the store of value narrative to Wall Street. In Jan. 2025, it positioned ETH as “a diversified complement to Bitcoin” because it’s “a store of value with cash flow,” while Etherealize also compared ETH to oil. In April 2026, Etherealize essentially argued that ETH could replace bitcoin by capturing the combined monetary premium of gold and BTC.

So now, if Buterin’s emphasis on the store-of-value side of ETH gains traction, then Wall Street might need to update its understanding of this asset according to Buterin’s explanation. If they’re convinced, then they might also need to reevaluate their BTC positions.

The Number Is Down

In either case, while each Etherealize pitch made increasingly ambitious claims about ETH, the price briefly hit a record of around $4,946 in Aug. 2025, but it now trades about 58% below that peak.

If flows into ETH exchange-traded funds (ETFs) indicate Wall Street’s interest in ether as an asset, those flows, measured in U.S. dollars, have been trending downward since Oct. 2025, as have flows into bitcoin ETFs. Over the same period, cumulative flows into ETH ETFs dropped 23%, compared with a 12% decline for BTC ETFs.

Falling prices for both assets also affected those flows: At the time of writing, BTC is down 30% over the past year, while ETH is down 41%.

Buterin Dismissed Earlier Arguments

Wall Street might be left scratching its head not only because of another narrative update, but also because of the reasoning behind it. Etherealize and Buterin appear to have reached similar conclusions for somewhat different reasons.

For example, while Etherealize claimed that fee burns send value from all Ethereum activity to ETH and that ETH is “potentially deflationary,” Buterin now downplays the importance of the burns. Buterin’s reasoning also weakens Etherealize’s answer to an argument Bitcoiner John Pfeffer made in 2017: that paying stakers with new issuance moves value from holders who don’t stake to holders who do.

Earlier this year, Etherealize rejected the objection that staking yield is just inflation, arguing that the burn offsets issuance and that a meaningful part of the yield comes from transaction fees. If the burn stays small and fees prove unreliable, as Buterin now says, then most staking yield comes from new issuance, confirming Pfeffer’s point. This negatively affects holders who don’t stake but helps treasury firms like Bitmine, which stakes around 84% of its ETH. As of Monday, the firm said it expects to earn $309 million worth of ETH annually at current yields.

What’s more, Etherealize criticized Bitcoin, saying it “chose ossification because it values near-term stability more than long-term viability.” Buterin now calls for “at least partial ossification” in Ethereum, too, once its core is complete.

What Is a Store of Value? There’s No One Answer

In either case, one of the biggest challenges for store-of-value narrative advocates in both the Bitcoin and Ethereum camps is that “store of value” has no universally agreed definition, and many assets considered stores of value have failed. For example, there’s no agreement on how long an asset must hold its value or how far it can fall and still qualify as a store of value.

According to Buterin, “the first and most important SoV-ish metric” is “to survive.” He lists other metrics, but survival alone might not be very encouraging for people looking to protect their capital: the crypto space is full of altcoins that have crashed more than 90% and continued to “survive” for years.

Looking at history, wampum lost its value in the 17th century after people found a way to produce it more cheaply. Silver also faced its share of problems when its use in coinage was suspended, and the U.S. demonetized it in the 19th century. Today, both Etherealize and some bitcoiners use silver as an analogy when discussing the competing asset, as they all aim for the “digital gold” title.

Historically, however, this might not be the best analogy, as gold has also experienced multi-decade, double-digit drawdowns. Meanwhile, as “digital gold” is now mostly associated with bitcoin, this asset is also known for its sharp, yet decreasing, volatility.

The Clash of Two Nearly Identical Stories

Therefore, if the loudest Ethereans start pushing the “ETH is SoV” narrative, then this could be an uphill battle trying to win traditional Wall Street investors:

• Previous attempts by Ethereum to differentiate itself from Bitcoin have seemingly failed to work as expected.
• Ethereum may now be moving into the store-of-value narrative, a space dominated by Bitcoin among crypto assets.
• About half of the arguments Buterin cites for ETH as an SoV (survival, slow change, low protocol politics, easy self-custody, and running a node on modest hardware) are already attributed to BTC.
• Although both the Ethereum and Bitcoin camps have kept changing their pitches to appeal to investors, Bitcoin’s SoV story has remained dominant.

Another Attempt to Improve on Bitcoin’s Story

Some Ethereum thought leaders are now claiming that this blockchain has all the main benefits of Bitcoin and adds something extra on top. For example, one update to Buterin’s framing described ETH as “a programmable store of value.” This echoes the “ultrasound money” campaign, which similarly borrowed Bitcoin’s “sound money” narrative and tried to prove that ETH was even better money. It didn’t work out.

Even one of the top Ethereum influencers, Bankless co-founder David Hoffman, sold all his ETH in May 2026. He wrote that the “ETH is money” thesis had played out rather than failed, and that he remained bullish on the network, but noted that he does think that “only a marginal amount of that success will be reflected in ETH.”

Reacting to Buterin’s post, Hoffman said: “The timing of this whole thing makes it feel like it’s coming from a place of weakness, not strength.” In the same thread, he also added: “My thought is that the universe/[context]/environment that we live is not suited to let ETH as an asset thrive.”

He also added a more bullish note: “Ethereum best path [is] forwards. If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Simpler, but More Complicated

On the one hand, Buterin’s suggestion to value ETH as a SoV makes the pitch simpler and clearer. However, the context—its similarities with bitcoin and the constant narrative changes—might make it more complicated.

For now, Bitcoin seemingly still wins the SoV title among crypto assets for most investors. Only a minority are likely to examine each network more closely, trying to understand how decentralized they really are, how well prepared they are for post-quantum cryptography, which has a better security model, their technical differences and capabilities, adoption challenges, and developments in the pipeline for both ecosystems.

As history shows, there’s no universal agreement on any of these aspects. This leaves investors with their beliefs rather than undeniable arguments for investing in either asset.

3x SoV vs. 5.7x SoV

In his Dec. 2017 paper, “An (Institutional) Investor’s Take on Cryptoassets,” John Pfeffer argued that there was a “possibility that ETH replaces bitcoin and becomes the dominant non-sovereign monetary store of value simply on pure store-of-value merits,” but that “an objective observer would give bitcoin significantly higher odds than ETH of becoming such a store of value.”

Now, nine years later, BTC has preserved and increased its value better than ETH. Based on the prices Pfeffer cited in the paper—about $13,000 per bitcoin and $700 per ether—bitcoin is up about 5.7x, while ether is up less than 3x. In either case, the game of storytelling is still ongoing.