Bitmine chairman Thomas Lee described a statement he attributed to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin—“ETH is a store of value; ETH is money”—as a “seismic shift” in how the asset’s role is framed, according to a ChainCatcher report published on November 9, 2026, at 21:41:52 (UTC+8).
Lee said Buterin made the statement at Devcon 8 in Mumbai. He argued that this positioning clarifies how ETH could capture value in what he described as an approaching tokenization and AI “supercycle.”
Collateral rather than a cash-flow token
Lee contrasted ETH with what he called the “cash-flow” token models of HYPE and LIT. In his framing, ETH is instead “pure and trusted collateral,” reflecting Ethereum’s role as the Layer 1 he said the vast majority of financial institutions choose when moving assets onto blockchains.
He argued that a store-of-value identity best fits both Ethereum’s future roadmap and ETH’s anticipated role in a tokenization supercycle.
The evidence gap
The report presents Lee’s interpretation of ETH’s positioning, not evidence that the projected supercycle or associated value capture will materialize. It supplies no institutional adoption figures or supporting detail for his claim about financial institutions’ preference for Ethereum. Buterin’s statement is also relayed through Lee’s account, rather than independently documented in the supplied report.