Ethereum's internal economic mechanism is being reconstructed amidst turmoil, with technical vulnerabilities and macroeconomic factors intertwining within 48 hours. This week, this major alternative cryptocurrency project suddenly came to a halt after a dangerous flaw in its fee recalculation mechanism was exposed following the launch of a Glamsterdam hard fork on the test network, a problem that severely disrupted the logic within smart contracts.
While the Ethereum community was discussing whether the network could still rely on its existing momentum to continue operating, Vitalik Buterin issued a declaration that almost dispelled all fears regarding the decline in mainnet revenue. The core of Vitalik's updated viewpoint is that the community should stop insisting on viewing ETH as a "token that burns fees." For a foundational blockchain with a market value of approximately $270 billion, trying to value it based on how much Gas is burned has reached a dead end. In the context of increasing global uncertainty, it is clearly more feasible to regard Vitalik as a "value storage tool" ( SoV ).
This shift by a key figure in the ecosystem occurred when the price of ETH was $2,240, and it could significantly change all the plans made around the architecture of Glamsterdam. The initial concept for this hard fork was based on an excess of block space supply, rather than a shortage. Ecosystem builders are prepared to use EIP-8037 (tariff calibration) and EIP-7928 (parallel production) to expand the capacity of L1, with the goal of raising the upper limit of Gas to 200 million units. The logic is that more available space will make transactions cheaper, while the token burn rate will gradually decrease.
The market believes that this scenario carries the risk of deflation. Vitalik was among the first to voice their opinion. According to his estimates, the historical peaks of burning achieved through EIP-1559 "have never seemed so strong." These peaks rely on the internal cycles of crypto speculation, and whenever a bear market begins, these cycles tend to decline.
"Don't be sad": Vitalik offers CROPS to ETH
Buterin indicates that attempting to extract a premium from the protocol by any means will push the system towards overly aggressive management and intervention. In other words, Ethereum will be forced to become a centralized commercial project and bear amplified costs in areas such as development. At the same time, with the rise of artificial intelligence and the onslaught of regulatory storms, what the market needs is not "enterprise clones of cryptocurrencies," but what Vitalik calls CROPS — "resistant to censorship and capture, open-source, private, and secure."
EIP-1559 will not disappear, and Vitalik also clearly states that if the combustion rate of Gas is always below 10%, there's no need to be sad either. The value of Ethereum lies in a completely different dimension.
Solana, co-founder, surprisingly agrees with Buterin on this point. He stated, "You can't treat transaction fees as a product to focus on," calling this idea "completely meaningless." Yakovenko believes that blockchain networks must create real value for end-users, rather than controlling the cost of entering the blockchain.
Despite the numerous technical details and conceptual discussions involved, the missed deadline for the testnet, as well as the Vitalik declaration, indicate that Ethereum has chosen a long-term, secure, and somewhat mundane stability for its foundational layer. The infrastructure does not attempt to manipulate the market through deflation records.
