Vitalik Reflects on Ethereum's Essence: The Greatest Value is a "Public Bulletin Board," Positioning Ethereum as Global Shared Memory

According to the latest long article posted by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on X platform, after attending the “Real World Cryptography (RWC)” conference, he gained a new insight into the “true purpose of blockchain.” He attempts to move beyond Ethereum-centric thinking, starting from first principles, and points out that Ethereum’s core values are sequentially: a public bulletin board (data availability), a Sybil-resistant payment system, and as a standardized layer for smart contracts.
(Background summary: Vitalik redefines Ethereum as a “shelter technology,” with three mechanisms that put on-chain censorship into history)
(Additional context: Vitalik: AI agents require ZK cryptography privacy to prevent API calls from exposing user behavior)

Table of Contents

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• Dropping the Ethereum burden, deriving blockchain value from “zero”
• Reversing perceptions: the greatest value is not smart contracts, but “public bulletin boards”
• The essence of payments and smart contracts: Sybil resistance and interoperability
• Debunking the high-fee myth of 2020: Ethereum as a “global shared memory”

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently participated in the “Real World Crypto (RWC)” conference and related side events. This gathering of cryptography experts led him to a profound realization about the fundamental question: “What is blockchain really for?”

I was recently at Real World Crypto (that’s crypto as in cryptography) and the associated side events, and one thing that struck me was that it was a clarifying experience in terms of understanding what blockchains are for.

We blockchain people (myself included) often have a…

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 12, 2026

Dropping the Ethereum burden, deriving blockchain value from “zero”

Vitalik admits that, as someone within the blockchain community (including himself), he often falls into an “Ethereum-centric” mindset — assuming he represents Ethereum, then seeking applications for this tool everywhere, and trying to convince others that “putting Ethereum here will bring many benefits.”

But he decided to change perspective: if we temporarily forget that we are “Ethereum community members,” and instead see ourselves as part of a community that values open source, censorship resistance, privacy, and security, can we start from zero and derive where Ethereum can provide the greatest value, with a group of cryptographers who share these values but have no “blockchain baggage”?

Reversing perceptions: the greatest value is not smart contracts, but “public bulletin boards”

The first answer Vitalik gives may surprise many. He states that the greatest value of blockchain is neither smart contracts nor payments, but the “Public Bulletin Board” as described by cryptographers.

Many cryptographic protocols (such as secure online voting, software and website version control, certificate revocation, etc.) require a publicly readable and writable space where people can publish data blobs. This function does not require any computation; fundamentally, it only needs data availability. While it indirectly needs a monetary mechanism to prevent spam, the core remains data storage and display.

Vitalik adds that Ethereum’s recent PeerDAS upgrade has increased its data availability capacity by 2.3 times, with clear pathways to further improve by 10 to 100 times in the future.

The essence of payments and smart contracts: Sybil resistance and interoperability

After confirming the foundational value of the bulletin board, Vitalik elaborates on the positioning of payments and smart contracts:

• Payments: Payments are essential for establishing permissionless APIs that are not flooded with spam. If developers want to build privacy-focused and secure decentralized applications (like messaging apps), and do not want to rely on mandatory binding to phone numbers to prevent fake accounts, then “ETH payments” serve as the most natural ultimate defense against Sybil attacks. He specifically highlights that “Ethereum + ZK payment channels” are among the best systems currently available for API billing.
• Smart Contracts: Mainly used for secure deposits (destroy ETH if rules are violated), implementing ZK payment channels, and serving as indicators for digital object interactions. Vitalik emphasizes that, technically, aside from handling ETH itself, smart contracts are just a “convenience tool.” Developers can treat the blockchain as a bulletin board and use ZK-SNARKs to provide computation results; however, in practice, “standardization” is very challenging. Smart contracts offer maximum interoperability, which leads to potential applications like DeFi.

Debunking the high-fee myth of 2020: Ethereum as a “global shared memory”

Summarizing the above, Vitalik concludes that if we see Ethereum purely as a technical tool, its essence is actually a “global shared memory.”

He openly states that the biggest obstacle preventing the world from recognizing this use case is that public perception has not yet updated from the era of 2020-2022, when transaction fees were extremely high. In fact, Ethereum’s fees are now very low, and with a stronger scalability roadmap, even if usage surges in the future, costs can remain affordable. Infrastructure that hides fee fluctuations from users (like blob publishers) is also quite mature.

“Using Ethereum’s blobs as bulletin boards, ETH as assets and general payment backup, and smart contracts as a shared programming layer—all within a decentralized, private, and secure open-source software stack—is entirely reasonable.”

Vitalik urges the community to continue improving protocols and infrastructure to ensure Ethereum can truly fulfill these roles.