Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the network’s clearest value proposition may not be smart contracts or payments, but something more fundamental: serving as a censorship-resistant public data layer. In a post reflecting conversations at Real World Crypto and related events, Buterin argued that freeing itself from its “blockchain baggage” would make it easier to see ETH’s core utility.
“I recently attended Real World Crypto and related events, and one thing that struck me was how clear the experience was in terms of understanding what blockchain is,” Buterin wrote. “We blockchain people (myself included) often tend to start from the perspective that we are Ethereum, so we have to go around looking for use cases for Ethereum.”
Ethereum’s core value begins with the ‘public bulletin board’
His point was to reassess Ethereum as an infrastructure rather than defending it as a brand. “Forget for a moment that we are the ‘Ethereum community.’ Rather, we are the maintainers of Ethereum tools,” he said, questioning where the network adds value from a perspective that has “no attachment to Ethereum specifically.”
He said the first answer was “It’s not what you think.” It’s “not a smart contract and it’s not a payment,” but what cryptographers call a “public bulletin board” is a place where you can post chunks of publicly readable and writable data. This is important because a variety of cryptographic systems, including secure online voting, software and website version control, and certificate revocation, rely on just that kind of shared infrastructure.
“This does not require computational capabilities,” Buterin wrote. “In fact, you don’t need money directly, even if you need it indirectly, because if you want to prevent unauthorized spam, you have to be economical. The only thing you fundamentally need is data availability.”
This framing leads directly to Ethereum’s recent expansion efforts. Buterin highlighted PeerDAS, which increased Ethereum’s data availability capacity by 2.3x and presented a roadmap to increase it by 10x to 100x. According to him, Ethereum is increasingly relevant not only for on-chain finance, but also for a broader kind of open, privacy-preserving internet infrastructure.
Payments are still important, but they are a secondary layer in the stack. Buterin argued that many systems require transfer of value not primarily for commerce, but for anti-spam, Sybil resistance, and machine-to-machine coordination. He pointed out that Ethereum and the ZK payment channel are powerful designs for permissionless APIs, and said ETH can serve as a “natural backstop” for applications that want to resist fake account abuse without relying on phone numbers or other centralized identity rails.
After that, a smart contract is created. Here, Buterin described it as useful for implementing configurations such as deposits, ZK payment channels, and managing pointers to “digital objects” linked to socially recognized external entities. He said that technically most non-ETH use cases can be handled by treating the chain as a bulletin board and using ZK-SNARKs for off-chain computations. However, in practice, standardizing that model is difficult, and shared implementation remains the path to greater interoperability.
The broader argument is that Ethereum works best when understood as a “global shared memory” inside a decentralized software stack. Buterin suggested that adoption may still lag reality because many builders are operating with outdated assumptions from 2020 to 2022, when fees were much higher and expansion looked less mature. He claimed that today’s fees are “very low,” the roadmap is more robust and the tools to protect users from fee volatility have improved.
At press time, ETH was trading at 2,110.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
editing process for focuses on providing thoroughly researched, accurate, and unbiased content. We adhere to strict sourcing standards and each page undergoes diligent review by our team of top technology experts and seasoned editors. This process ensures the integrity, relevance, and value of the content for readers.
