Buterin Says Ethereum’s Survival Underpins Ether’s Store-of-Value Case

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said Ethereum’s ability to withstand security and centralization risks is central to Ether (ETH) as a store of value, outlining priorities for the network and its long-term holders.

In a Nov. 8 X thread, Buterin put the network’s ability to endure ahead of other measures of ETH’s value to someone holding it over time. He linked that durability to choices about protocol security and decentralization.

Buterin favored conservative security decisions in Ethereum’s core protocol. He cited hash-centered security, formal proofs and more than three times the number of rounds known to be needed for security. He also called for a high bar before adding precompiles that expand the protocol’s scope or rewards within the protocol that interested groups could capture.

His priorities extended to how people hold and use ETH. Buterin pointed to multisignature arrangements and work on private account abstraction as ways to improve security and privacy for holders. He said FOCIL aims to protect their ability to send transactions.

Reducing dependence on outside infrastructure is another part of the decentralization effort, Buterin said. As an example, he said a node he runs on a laptop synchronized in less than six hours and uses one-eighth of the machine’s hard drive.

Buterin also connected ETH’s usefulness to assets issued natively on Ethereum’s base layer. He said more real-world and decentralized assets there would give holders ways to exchange ETH for other assets without trusting an intermediary or to use ETH as collateral. He cautioned that faster block production must be weighed against its effect on decentralization.

The argument builds on his separate warning that efforts to maximize ETH fee burns could raise transaction costs and reduce network use. In the new thread, Buterin described decentralization and CROPS — censorship and capture resistance, open-source software, privacy and security — as the qualities behind ETH’s store-of-value case.