Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says the network’s most obvious value proposition may not be smart contracts or payments, but something more fundamental: acting as a censorship-resistant public data layer. In a post reflecting the conversation on real-world crypto and related events, Buterin argued that moving out of the “blockchain baggage” makes it easier to see ETH’s core utility.
“I was recently at the Real World Crypto (it’s crypto like cryptography) and related side event, and one thing that impressed me was it was a clear experience in terms of understanding what blockchains are for,” Buterin wrote. “We blockchain people (myself included) often tend to start from the perspective that we are Ethereum, and so we need to move around and find use cases for Ethereum.”
Ethereum’s core value starts with a ‘public bulletin board’
His point was about reevaluating Ethereum as an infrastructure rather than saving it as a brand. “For a moment, let’s forget that we are the ‘Ethereum community’. Rather, we are maintainers of Ethereum tools,” he wrote, asking where the network adds value when viewed with “zero attachment to Ethereum specifically.”
The first answer, he said, is, “Not what you think.” It’s “not a smart contract, it’s not even a payment”, but what cryptographers call a “public bulletin board”, a publicly readable and writable place to post data blobs. This matters because a range of cryptographic systems, including secure online voting, software and website version control, and certificate revocation, rely on exactly the same shared infrastructure.
“It does not require any computation functionality,” Buterin wrote. “In fact, it doesn’t require money directly, although it does require money indirectly, because if you want permissionless anti-spam it has to be affordable. The only thing it basically requires is data availability.”
That framing leads directly to Ethereum’s recent scaling work. Buterin highlighted PeerDAS, which he said increases Ethereum’s data availability capacity by 2.3x, as well as a roadmap to increase it by 10x to 100x more. According to him, this makes Ethereum relevant not only for onchain finance, but also for a broader class of open, privacy-preserving internet infrastructure.
Payments still matter, but as a secondary layer in the stack. Buterin argued that many systems require value transfers not primarily for commerce, but for anti-spam, Sybil resistance, and machine-to-machine coordination. He pointed to Ethereum plus ZK payment channels as a robust design for permissionless APIs, and said ETH could serve as a “natural backstop” for applications that want to resist fake-account abuse without relying on phone numbers or other centralized identity rails.
Smart contracts come after that. 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 socially recognized external entities. Technically, he said, most non-ETH use cases can be handled by treating the chain as a bulletin board and using ZK-SNARKs for off-chain calculations. However, in practice, that model is difficult to standardize, and shared execution remains the more interoperable route.
The widespread claim is that Ethereum works best when understood as a “global shared memory” inside a decentralized software stack. Buterin suggested adoption may still be lagging behind that reality because many builders are operating with outdated assumptions from 2020 to 2022, when fees were far higher and scaling looked less mature. Today, he argued, fees are “extremely low,” the roadmap is stronger, and tooling has improved to protect users from fee volatility.
At press time, ETH was trading at 2,110.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from tradingview.com
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