Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin says the network’s clearest value proposition may not be smart contracts or payments, but something more fundamental: as a censorship-resistant public data layer. In a post covering conversations at Real World Crypto and related events, Buterin argued that getting out of the “baggage of the blockchain” would make it easier to see the underlying service of ETH.
“I was recently at Real World Crypto (that’s crypto as in cryptography) and related side events, and one thing that struck me was the clear experience in understanding what blockchain is for,” Buterin said. “We blockchain people (myself included) often tend to start from the point of view that we are Ethereum and so we have to go around and find Ethereum use cases.”
Ethereum’s real value starts with the “Public Bulletin Board”.
His point was less about defending Ethereum as a brand than re-evaluating it as an infrastructure. “For a moment, let’s forget that we are the ‘Ethereum community.’ Rather, we are Ethereum tool custodians,” he wrote, asking where the network adds value when it sees “zero connectivity to Ethereum.”
The first answer, he said, is “not what you think.” It’s “not smart contracts, not even payments,” but what cryptographers call a “public bulletin board,” a publicly readable and writable place to post blocks of data. This is important because a number of cryptographic systems, including secure online voting, website software and version control, and certificate revocation, depend on this kind of shared infrastructure.
“It does not require any computational functions,” Buterin wrote. “Actually, it doesn’t cost money directly, although it does cost money indirectly, because if you want to have unauthorized anti-spam, it has to be economical. The only thing it basically requires is the availability of data.”
This framework leads directly to Ethereum’s latest scalable functionality. Buterin highlighted PeerDAS, which he says has increased Ethereum’s data access capacity by 2.3x, with a roadmap to push it 10x to 100x more. According to him, this makes Ethereum more relevant not only for onchain finance, but also for a broader class of open and privacy-preserving internet infrastructure.
Charges are still important, but as a secondary layer in the stack. Buterin argued that many systems need value transfer not primarily for business, but for anti-spam, anti-spyware and machine-to-machine synchronization. He pointed to Ethereum plus ZK’s payment channels as a strong design for permissionless APIs, and said that ETH could serve as a “natural backstop” for apps that want to combat counterfeit account abuse without relying on phone numbers or other identity-centric rails.
Smart contracts follow. Here, Buterin described them as useful for security deposits, for implementing constructs such as ZK payment channels, and for managing pointers to “digital objects” linked to publicly recognized external entities. Technically, he said, most ETH use cases can be solved by treating the chain as a bulletin board and using ZK-SNARKs for off-chain computation. However, in practice it is difficult to standardize this model, and collaborative implementation remains a more collaborative approach.
The broader claim is that Ethereum works best when understood as a “global shared memory” within a decentralized software stack. Buterin suggested that adoption may still lag behind reality because many builders are working with outdated assumptions from 2020 to 2022, when payments were much higher and the scale seemed less mature. Today, he said fees are “very low,” the roadmap is more robust, and tools to protect users from payment volatility have improved.
At press time, ETH traded at 2,110.
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