Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has said that the network’s clearest value proposition is not smart contracts or payments, but something more fundamental: it could serve as a censorship-resistant public data layer. In a post reflecting on conversations at Real World Crypto and related events, Buterin argued that stepping outside of the “blockchain baggage” makes it easier to see ETH’s core utility.
“I recently attended a side event related to Real World Crypto (i.e. Crypto in Cryptography) and one of the things that stood out to me was how clear an experience it was in terms of understanding the purpose of blockchain,” Buterin wrote. “We blockchain people (myself included) tend to start from the perspective that we are Ethereum, so we have to look around for use cases for Ethereum.”
Ethereum’s core values start with “public bulletin boards”
His point was less to defend Ethereum as a brand and more to reevaluate Ethereum as an infrastructure. “Let’s forget for a moment that we are the ‘Ethereum community.’ Rather, we are maintainers of Ethereum tools,” he wrote, asking where the network adds value when viewed “without any particular attachment to Ethereum.”
The first answer, he said, was, “It’s not what you think.” This is “not a smart contract, not even a payment,” but what cryptographers call a “public bulletin board,” a publicly readable and readable place to post data blobs. This is important because various cryptographic systems, such as secure online voting, software and website version control, and certificate revocation, rely on exactly that kind of shared infrastructure.
“This doesn’t require computing power,” Buterin wrote. “In reality, you need money indirectly, but you don’t need money directly, because if you want permissionless spam protection, you need to be economical. Basically, all you need is data availability.”
This framework connects directly to Ethereum’s recent scaling efforts. Buterin highlighted PeerDAS, saying it will increase Ethereum’s data availability capacity by 2.3x and has a roadmap to further increase it by 10x to 100x. That makes Ethereum increasingly important not only for on-chain finance, but also for the broader open and privacy-preserving internet infrastructure, he said.
Payments are still important, but as a second layer in the stack. Buterin argued that many systems require value transfer, not primarily for commercial purposes, but for anti-spam, Sybil resistance, and machine-to-machine coordination. He pointed to the strong design of Ethereum and ZK payment channels with permissionless APIs, and said ETH can serve as a “natural backstop” for applications that want to combat fake account abuse without relying on phone numbers or other centralized identity rails.
Smart contracts will come later. Buterin explained here that they will help implement security deposits, structures like the ZK payment channel, and manage pointers to “digital objects” associated with socially recognized external entities. He said that technically most use cases other than ETH can be addressed by treating the chain as a bulletin board and using ZK-SNARK for off-chain calculations. However, in practice, that model is difficult to standardize, and shared execution remains a more interoperable method.
The broader claim is that Ethereum works best when understood as “global shared memory” within a decentralized software stack. Mr Buterin suggested that adoption may still be lagging behind that reality, as many builders are operating on outdated assumptions from 2020 to 2022, when fees were much higher and scale expansion appeared to have not yet matured. He claimed that prices are now “very low”, the roadmap is stronger and the tools to protect users from price fluctuations are better.
At the time of writing, ETH was trading at 2,110.
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