Ethereum price prediction: Buterin bets on store of value as Bitmine adds 9,587 ETH

The facts first: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said on Sunday that Ether should above all convince as a store of value, not through the burning of transaction fees. A day later Bitmine, the largest listed holder of Ether, reported 6,070,092 ETH on its books, or 4.97 percent of all Ether. Our assessment follows further down. The new narrative supports the long-term case, but in the short term it cannot outweigh the outflows from US funds.

Ether costs around $2,078 on Tuesday afternoon according to CoinGecko, roughly €1,858. The price fell 2.4 percent in 24 hours, with a daily range of $2,054 to $2,148. Over seven days it is down a good 9 percent, over 30 days a good 17 percent. Where the price could head over the coming months is covered in our Ethereum price prediction. This piece asks what Buterin's change of course and Bitmine's purchases mean for the weeks ahead.

Buterin's change of course: Ether as a store of value, not a fee burner

The trigger was a long post on X that Buterin published on Sunday morning, two days after the end of the Devcon 8 developer conference in Mumbai. According to The Block, he wrote that it makes much more sense to focus on "ETH as store of value" than on "ETH as fee-burning token". At the same time he called the fee burn under EIP-1559 "fine and good" and said it should stay.

The key sentence concerns expectations for the burn. Holders should not be sad if the burn stays permanently below ten percent of the break-even level, Buterin wrote, because ETH's value comes from elsewhere. With that, the project's most important figure is distancing himself from a narrative that has underpinned many price targets since 2021: that Ether becomes scarcer because use of the network destroys coins.

Buterin makes his case in three steps. First, the burn was never a real floor, because most fees in 2021 to 2023 came from applications inside the crypto world that shrink along with the Ether price itself. A floor only works if the revenue comes from outside. Second, Ethereum would have to behave like a large corporation to maximise fees, with heavily interventionist governance over the long term. Third, for holders the first metric of a store of value is simply that the network survives; fees that are too high would drive away exactly the users who most need privacy and security.

EIP-1559 explained: what the fee burn does

EIP-1559 is the fee reform that has applied on the Ethereum blockchain since August 2021. Every transaction pays a base fee that does not go to validators but is permanently destroyed. When demand for block space rises, the base fee rises, and with it the amount of Ether burned. At the same time, new Ether is constantly created through validator rewards. Whether supply shrinks or grows therefore depends on which of the two flows is larger.

How far apart the two flows now are, we showed on Sunday in our piece on 2,982 new ETH in a single day, of which only 10 were burned. Buterin's post is the political answer to exactly these figures. He does not declare the burn a failure; he declares it secondary.

Burn figures since 2022: 1.48 million ETH versus 19,200 ETH

The orders of magnitude show why the change of course is coming now. According to figures compiled by The Block alongside Buterin's post, around 1.48 million ETH were burned in 2022, worth about $3.6 billion at the time. So far in 2026 the figure is only around 19,200 ETH, or about $43 million. The amount burned has fallen to roughly one seventieth of its 2022 value.

The main reason is well known. Since the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, layer-2 networks have settled their data cheaply through so-called blobs, and fees on the base layer have fallen accordingly. For users that is a gain, for the "ultrasound money" narrative a loss. Buterin himself calculates what a fee model would yield as a valuation floor: $1 billion of burn a year at a discount rate of four percent would give a notional floor of $25 billion. Ether's market value stood at a good $270 billion on Sunday, more than ten times as much.

The comparison with a corporation also comes from Buterin. Ether, he said, is worth roughly as much as the cosmetics group L'Oréal. If Ethereum wanted to invest a fixed share of its value in research like such a company, the protocol would need around 700,000 ETH a year in funding, and validator income would fall by two thirds. A network that works like that would, in his view, no longer be a neutral store of value.

Bitmine at 4.97 percent: how close the 5 percent target is

The day's second catalyst comes from Norwalk, Connecticut. In its release of November 9, Bitmine Immersion Technologies reports holdings of 6,070,092 ETH as of Sunday at 8 p.m. German time, valued at $2,234 per Ether. In the previous week it added 9,587 ETH. Based on a supply of 122.2 million ETH, the company thus holds 4.97 percent of all Ether.

Bitmine has set itself the goal of owning five percent of the supply. By our calculation that equals around 6.11 million ETH, so just under 40,000 ETH are still missing. If the company keeps buying at last week's pace, it would reach the mark in a good four weeks, at the beginning of December. Since launching its Ether strategy on June 30, 2025, Bitmine says it has bought every week.

Chairman Thomas "Tom" Lee explicitly picks up on Buterin's post in the release. He calls it a fundamental shift and describes Ether as "pristine and trusted collateral" for financial institutions bringing assets onto the blockchain. Compared with Sunday's valuation price, however, the holdings are worth around $950 million less on Tuesday afternoon: at $2,078, 6.07 million ETH are worth about $12.6 billion instead of $13.6 billion.

Staking at Bitmine: 5.23 million ETH and a 2.65 percent yield

What stands out is how much Bitmine does not just hold but puts to work. As of November 8, the company had 5,227,037 ETH staked, around 86 percent of its holdings. Staking means Ether is posted as collateral to confirm blocks and earns a reward in new Ether in return. Bitmine puts the yield over the past seven days at 2.65 percent; fully deployed, that would come to around $359 million a year, according to the company.

This is where the circle closes with Buterin. Anyone who holds Ether as a store of value and stakes it at the same time earns from the issuance of new coins, not from the burn. For a large holder that buys faster than new Ether is created, a slightly growing total supply is therefore no contradiction of the business model.

Since Monday: Ether stays below the 200-day moving average at $2,154

In our Ethereum price prediction on the options expiry on Monday evening, Ether stood at around $2,123 and had just fallen below its 200-day moving average. Since then the price has lost another good 2 percent. The line, calculated from CoinGecko's daily closing prices, remains unchanged at $2,154; the 50-day moving average runs much higher at $2,471. New is Tuesday's daily low of $2,054.

Friday's date still stands. At 9 a.m. German time, Ethereum options covering a good 135,000 ETH expire on Deribit, and hedges against falling prices are clustered at the $2,000 strike. That level is now only 3.8 percent below the current price.

ETF outflows: $184.5 million on November 9

Bitmine's purchases are up against selling pressure from US funds. According to SoSoValue data, investors pulled a net $184.51 million from exchange-traded Ether funds on Monday. In the week of November 2 to 6, outflows had already reached around $365 million. On a single day, roughly nine times as much flowed out as Bitmine bought in the whole of the previous week: at the valuation price, 9,587 ETH equal a good $21 million.

On top of that came a wave of forced selling in the derivatives market on Monday. According to CoinGlass, positions worth more than $462 million were liquidated within 24 hours, around $425 million of them on the long side. A liquidation occurs when the collateral posted for a leveraged position is no longer sufficient and the exchange forcibly closes the position.

The store-of-value thesis: what speaks for it and what against it

Our view: Buterin's post matters more for Ether's long-term case than any daily move, because it closes a gap in the argument. The 2026 burn figures have disproved the old narrative of an ever scarcer coin; a rationale built on security, neutrality and survivability no longer depends on the fee situation. That Bitmine stakes 86 percent of its holdings and Tom Lee immediately picked up the thesis shows that large holders do the maths exactly this way.

Three points speak against it, and all of them are documented. The funds have been losing money for two weeks, $184.5 million on Monday alone. The price is below the 200-day moving average and therefore in a downtrend that no narrative can undo. And a store of value that loses 17 percent in 30 days still has to earn that reputation. In short, the thesis can be right and the price can still fall until fund flows turn. For us, a turning signal would only be a close above $2,154 combined with positive fund flows.

Voices in the industry are divided. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko agreed with Buterin that fees cannot be treated as a product. Simon Dedic, founder of Moonrock Capital, called the store-of-value role the biggest reason to back Ethereum and, at the same time, the easiest story to sell to institutional investors. That second half of the sentence shows the weakness: a story that is easy to sell still has to show up in inflows.

Ether levels: $2,000 below, $2,154 and $2,279 above

On the downside, the first level is Tuesday's low of $2,054, and below that the round $2,000 mark, where put options are clustered ahead of Friday's expiry. If the price falls below it, the next documented zone lies only at the summer lows: at the end of June, Ether closed at around $1,566, its lowest daily close of the past twelve months.

On the upside, Ether first has to reclaim the 200-day moving average at $2,154. Above that lie the $2,200 mark and the middle of the Bollinger Bands at around $2,279, which Crypto.news cited as resistance on Tuesday morning. Bitmine's own valuation price of $2,234 sits right between those two levels. A return to this area would recover last week's losses; the 50-day moving average at $2,471 remains out of reach until then.

Staking, holding period and leverage: the situation for investors in Germany

Anyone who, like Bitmine, relies on staking should know the tax side. In Germany, staking rewards are taxable as other income when received, provided all income of this kind exceeds the exemption limit of €256 a year. Ten staked ETH at a 2.65 percent yield bring in around 0.27 ETH a year, just under €500 at today's price, so the limit is reached quickly. The holding period for the staked Ether itself is not extended by staking; it remains one year. We track the status of the planned abolition of this period in our overview of the crypto holding period reform; a cabinet decision is still missing.

If you want to compare staking providers, look at three things: the yield after fees, the lock-up period until withdrawal and whether the provider is authorised in the EU under MiCA. Our comparison of staking platforms sets out the terms side by side. For investors in Germany, Ether is best bought on an exchange with a MiCA licence, as listed in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.

Leverage deserves caution. Monday's liquidation wave hit long positions almost exclusively, and ahead of an options expiry with a put cluster just below the price, prices tend to swing more. Anyone betting on a recovery with leverage should know their liquidation price and not place it near $2,000.

Ether at $2,078: without ETF inflows the thesis lacks momentum

1. Record purchase dates. Note the purchase date of every Ether position while the one-year holding period applies. Crypto tax software does this automatically, including for staking rewards.
2. Compare staking terms. Yield, lock-up period and authorisation decide whether staking is worth it; the staking comparison shows the differences.
3. Keep the levels in view. Until Friday at 9 a.m. the $2,000 mark counts, after that a return above $2,154. If you want to buy more, you will find suitable venues in the comparison of regulated exchanges.

(As of November 10, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy. Cryptocurrencies can lose value up to a total loss.)