Biteye’s analysis, published on November 11, 2026, revisited a question raised by Vitalik Buterin in a November 8 post on X: if lower fees mean fewer ETH burns, what supports a public chain’s native token value?
Buterin argued that fee burns are not a reliable valuation floor. Much of Ethereum’s past fee revenue came from speculative activity within crypto, he said, and could shrink when markets cool. He still supported EIP-1559, but said that even if burns remained below 10% of new issuance, pursuing higher fees merely to increase burns could harm Ethereum’s decentralization and long-term development.
Supply mechanisms differ
Biteye surveyed seven networks whose issuance, burns and circulating-supply changes work in different ways:
- BTC: Its supply is capped at approximately 21 million. At a 3.125 BTC block reward and an average of one block every ten minutes, Biteye estimated annual issuance of roughly 164,300 BTC and annualized supply inflation of about 0.82%.
- ETH: Since the 2022 Merge, cumulative supply growth was about 1.37%, according to the article. EIP-1559 burns base fees, but burns over the preceding 30 days offset only about 3.2% of new issuance.
- SOL: Solana’s inflation schedule began at 8% annually, declines by 15% each year and targets 1.5% over the long term. During the 2024 meme-token boom, daily burns at one point exceeded 10,000 SOL; in January 2025, burns offset about 23% of issuance. After SIMD-0096 directed all priority fees to validators while retaining burns of 50% of base fees, daily burns at one point fell to around 700 SOL.
- BNB: Rather than relying on continuing issuance, BNB reduces supply through quarterly Auto-Burn and BEP-95 fee burns, toward a target supply of 100 million. Biteye put the first four quarterly burns of 2026 at approximately 6.2 million BNB. Auto-Burn depends on price and block count; BEP-95 burns a portion of network fees.
- TRX: TRON issues block rewards and burns TRX paid for Energy and Bandwidth. Users can also obtain those resources through staking or rental, so more USDT transfers do not necessarily produce a proportional rise in burns.
- AVAX: Supply is capped at 720 million. Validator rewards add supply, while fees on the 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, and approximately 5.18 million burned cumulatively—insufficient to offset issuance.
- SUI: Total supply is fixed at 10 billion; token unlocks are the key source of growth in circulating supply. Its Storage Fund locks some storage fees and uses staking returns to compensate validators. Most fees can be recovered when data is deleted; the unrecovered portion remains in the fund rather than being permanently burned.
These figures span different dates and measurement windows. They describe each network’s mechanism and reported supply changes, not a directly comparable, same-period dataset.
What a burn-based model misses
Biteye recounted a simple model discussed by Buterin: token valuation = annual value burned ÷ discount rate. At a 4% discount rate, a chain consistently burning $1 billion worth of tokens each year would have a theoretical valuation of $25 billion under that model. The word consistently carries much of the assumption: fee revenue can change sharply with market activity.
For ETH, Biteye reported burns of approximately 1.48 million ETH, worth about $3.6 billion, in 2022. From the start of 2026 through November 8, it reported about 19,200 ETH burned, worth roughly $43 million. Annualizing the latter amount to about $50 million and applying the same 4% rate yields a theoretical $1.25 billion—more than 200 times below the roughly $270 billion ETH market capitalization cited for the same period. Biteye used that gap to show the model’s limits, not to establish a new price target.
Burns also capture only one route by which network activity distributes value. Biteye pointed to Solana priority fees paid to validators and TRON resource-rental income that may accrue to stakers. Neither is fully reflected in a burn figure.
Buterin instead emphasized Ethereum’s decentralization, censorship resistance, open-source character, privacy and security, particularly as AI develops. Whether those properties support a durable monetary premium is harder to quantify than a burn rate. As Biteye noted, ETH’s role as collateral, a medium of exchange and a native asset in on-chain finance may contribute to demand, while its lack of a fixed supply cap raises a separate question about long-term confidence in its monetary policy. The evidence presented does not resolve what premium the market should assign to either case.
Original article by Biteye, published November 11, 2026, at 11:03 (UTC+8): PANews.
