Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says the crypto industry may be overcomplicating what blockchains are actually good for.
Speaking at X after attending the Real World Crypto conference — which focuses on cryptography research — Buterin said stepping outside the typical blockchain bubble helped him rethink Ethereum’s core role.
Instead of starting with Ethereum and trying to find places to use it, he suggested that developers should first ask what kinds of tools are needed to build secure, open, and censorship-resistant technology.
From that perspective, Ethereum’s most important function may be surprisingly simple: to act as what cryptographers call a “public message board.”
Many secure digital systems need a place where information can be published and verified. It can include things like secure voting systems, lists of digital certificate revocations, or registries used in cryptographic protocols. These systems do not necessarily need complicated smart contracts or financial transactions, but rather a common place where data can be stored and accessed reliably.
Ethereum can serve that role because it provides a decentralized network where anyone can publish data and anyone can read it.
Buterin said recent upgrades to Ethereum make this type of use even more practical. An upgrade, known as PeerDAS, increases how much data the network can store and share, with plans to scale the capacity much further in the future.
Although these systems do not always require payments, some form of financial cost is often required to prevent spam in open networks. This is where Ethereum’s native token, ether (ETH), comes in.
Payments can help protect decentralized services from abuse. Buterin gives as an example, if a messaging app allowed anyone to create unlimited accounts for free, attackers could flood the system with spam. Requiring small payments in ETH can make these kinds of attacks expensive while keeping the system open to everyone.
Buterin also noted that Ethereum can help power new types of payment systems. Technologies such as zero-knowledge payment channels could allow people to pay small amounts for services while keeping the transactions private.
Smart contracts also still play an important role, especially for holding security deposits or enabling automated agreements between users.
Taken together, Buterin described Ethereum as a kind of “global shared memory” — infrastructure that allows many different applications to store data, exchange value and coordinate with each other.
“Ethereum has a lot of value as you can see from first principles if you take a step back and see it purely as a technical tool: global shared memory,” he wrote.
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