Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says the crypto industry may be overcomplicating what blockchains are actually good for.

In a post on 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 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: acting as what cryptographers call a “public bulletin board.”

Many secure digital systems need a place where information can be publicly posted and verified. That could include things like secure voting systems, lists of revoked digital certificates or records used in cryptographic protocols. These systems don’t necessarily need complicated smart contracts or financial transactions, but instead a shared place where data can be reliably stored and accessed.

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 are making this type of use even more practical. One upgrade, known as PeerDAS, increases how much data the network can store and share, with plans to scale capacity much further in the future.

While these systems don’t always require payments, some kind of economic cost is often needed to prevent spam in open networks. That’s 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 that kind of attack expensive while still keeping the system open to anyone.

Buterin also noted that Ethereum can help power new types of payment systems. Technologies like zero-knowledge payment channels could allow people to pay small amounts for services while keeping transactions private.

Smart contracts still play an important role as well, particularly 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, that 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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