Vitalik Buterin Reconsiders Ethereum’s Core Value as ‘Global Shared Memory’

Vitalik Buterin recently posted after attending the Real World Crypto event, reconsidering Ethereum’s core value. He stated that Ethereum’s most fundamental purpose is not smart contracts or payments, but rather a cryptographic “public bulletin board”—providing an openly readable and writable data storage layer for protocols such as secure voting, software version control, and certificate revocation. Second is the payment function, with ETH serving as a natural tool against Sybil attacks; smart contracts come third, primarily used for secure deposits, ZK payment channels, and interactions with digital objects. Vitalik emphasized that Ethereum is essentially a “global shared memory,” and with the PeerDAS upgrade increasing data availability by 2.3 times and significantly reducing fees, its real-world application potential remains severely undervalued by the market.