Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently redefined his views on the true value of the Ethereum network after attending the Real World Crypto conference. He believes that the network's fundamental value is not closely related to smart contracts or decentralized finance, but rather to more basic concepts.
During the conference, Buterin experienced a clear realization that deepened his understanding of the "purpose of blockchain."
He engaged with many like-minded individuals who had no specific ties to blockchain, and the conclusions he drew surprised even him. He posits that the most basic function Ethereum provides is a public bulletin board—a globally writable and readable space where anyone can publish data without permission. Smart contracts are not the top priority, nor are payment functionalities; rather, data availability takes precedence.
The importance of the bulletin board far exceeds its surface meaning.
This term fails to fully capture its implications. Buterin pointed out that various cryptographic protocols, including secure online voting systems, software version control, and certificate revocation mechanisms, rely on a neutral and tamper-proof platform where data can be publicly accessed and read. These use cases do not require computation and, strictly speaking, do not need funding, although Buterin mentioned that ensuring permissionless anti-spam protection does require economic backing. At the most fundamental level, they need data availability, and Ethereum's recent PeerDAS upgrade has increased its data availability capacity by 2.3 times. Buterin stated that its roadmap has the potential to enhance this by ten to a hundred times.
This is significant. Historically, many privacy and security applications that relied on trusted intermediaries could, in principle, be rebuilt as infrastructure on Ethereum without needing to engage with tokens, smart contracts, or decentralized finance.
Payments come second, and smart contracts last.
In his restructured hierarchy, Buterin places payments in the second position. Many protocols require payment mechanisms to function, whether to compensate service providers, reduce spam, or enable permissionless API access without being overwhelmed by the system. He specifically noted that Ethereum's integration of zero-knowledge payment channels makes it one of the strongest payment systems for API use cases. At the same time, he pointed out that ETH, as an anti-Sybil tool, requires participants to have a small economic stake, which is a natural choice for applications needing to prevent large-scale account creation without relying on phone number verification or other privacy-invasive identification methods.
Smart contracts rank last in this hierarchy.