Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum's core value is a globally shared "bulletin board," with smart contracts and payments being merely additional features.

In an article published on the X platform, Vitalik Buterin stated that Ethereum's fundamental value lies not in smart contracts or payment functions, but in serving as a publicly writable and readable "bulletin board," providing data availability support for cryptographic protocols. He pointed out that many cryptographic protocols—including secure online voting, software version control, and certificate revocation—require a public data space, and Ethereum's upgraded PeerDAS mechanism can improve data availability by 2.3 times, with the potential to improve it by another 10 to 100 times. Buterin also emphasized that ETH's role in payments, resisting Sybil attacks, and securing smart contract deposits makes it a core component of a decentralized, private, and secure open-source technology stack. He believes that Ethereum can be viewed as a "global shared memory," and its low fees and scalability improvements will further drive its application deployment, including DeFi and many other potential scenarios.