From “Global Computer/Settlement Layer” to “Bulletin Board”: What Are Ethereum and Vitalik Trying to Achieve?

Over the past decade, it has indeed been responsible for executing smart contracts, hosting DeFi, and supporting एनएफटी, effectively becoming a programmable financial and application execution layer.

However, on March 12, Vitalik Buterin proposed a rather refreshing perspective—the क्रिप्टो industry may have overcomplicated the actual use cases of blockchain. Ethereum’s most fundamental value might not be the smart contract functionality we have always emphasized, but an extremely simple primitive:

A cryptographically secure, globally shared “public bulletin board.”

Many users likely have questions: from “computer” to “bulletin board,” is this a functional regression, or is there another perspective to consider?

1. The “Global Shared Memory” Behind the “Bulletin Board”

The so-called “public bulletin board,” as the name suggests, fundamentally refers to data availability.

It’s quite simple to understand. We can imagine a giant bulletin board posted in a central city square—anyone can read it, nothing can be withdrawn, and there is no censorship. What’s referred to here is simply a bulletin board on a global scale: users worldwide can confirm that the data indeed exists; even the most powerful government cannot erase it, and no administrator can prevent you from publishing compliant content.

Ultimately, the core need for many current digital systems, such as secure online voting and software version control, is not complex financial transactions, but rather a censorship-resistant, publicly verifiable data publishing space. This is precisely the “bulletin board” long sought in the field of cryptography:

• Secure Voting Systems. Traditional electronic voting relies on centralized databases, posing risks of tampering. Publishing voting records on Ethereum allows anyone to verify the results, while voter privacy is protected through cryptography.
• Certificate Revocation Systems. Revocation lists for HTTPS certificates and software signing certificates require a publicly accessible, immutable data source. Blockchain is naturally suited for this role.
• Multi-party Coordination and Governance. Open-source projects, decentralized governance, community funds—these scenarios require multiple parties to collaborate without trusting each other. Ethereum can serve as a neutral coordination layer for publishing data and verifying actions.

These scenarios share a common characteristic: they don’t need Ethereum to “run” anything; they only need Ethereum to “remember” something. Therefore, Vitalik provided a more precise ultimate definition: Ethereum is global shared memory.

Anyone can write to it, anyone can read from it, and no single entity can unilaterally erase it—not a company, not a government, not even Vitalik himself.

This positioning also corresponds to a clear technical roadmap. The EIP-4844 (Blob data) in 2024 was the initial scaling of this bulletin board. The full implementation of PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) in 2026 expanded the “area” of the bulletin board a hundredfold. Ethereum is no longer fixated on the TPS of the main chain but is committed to becoming the world’s largest capacity, highest security attestation center—a foundational layer providing globally shared data availability.

2. With AI’s Arrival, the Public Bulletin Board Becomes More Necessary

Understanding the essence of the “bulletin board” and then looking at the advent of AI reveals that these are not two separate things, but two sides of the same coin.

Objectively speaking, the “bulletin board” concept is actually quite related to the current impact of AI on Web3. Because nowadays, more and more people have more daily conversations with AI than with any single human. However, with current AI services, what you ask, when you ask it, and how many times you ask are all tied to your real identity.

For example, using ChatGPT requires an email and credit card; calling the Claude API leaves clear billing records—every prompt is a digital trace pointing back to you.

Therefore, in February 2026, Vitalik and Davide Crapis, the AI lead at the Ethereum Foundation, jointly proposed ZK API Usage Credits, aiming to enable anonymous calls to large AI models using zero-knowledge proofs. The logic of the scheme is also clear:

A user deposits funds (e.g., 100 USDC) into a smart contract, which records this deposit in an encrypted on-chain list. For each subsequent AI API call, the user does not need to expose their identity; they only need to generate a zero-knowledge proof demonstrating “I have the right to use this quota” to complete the call.

What does this scheme need? A public bulletin board—a publicly verifiable, immutable data layer to record “who has how much quota,” without recording “who is who.”

Meanwhile, the proliferation of AI Agents brings another new problem: how can these automatically running programs achieve economic coordination among themselves? After all, when one AI Agent needs to call the service of another, it needs to pay, establish credit, and handle disputes. But it has no bank account, no legal identity, and no “real-name information” trusted by centralized platforms.

Here, Ethereum, as an economic coordination layer for AI Agents, provides a natural answer. Agents can initiate transactions on-chain, stake collateral, and establish verifiable reputation records—all built upon the transparent data layer provided by that “bulletin board.”

Within a larger framework, this positioning of the relationship between Ethereum and AI is even one of integration—as AI capabilities grow stronger, the needs for privacy protection, verifiability, and decentralization become more rigid.

Therefore, Ethereum is not competing with AI; it aims to become the most needed infrastructure in the AI era—a public data layer that anyone can write to, anyone can trust, and no one can shut down.

3. Is the “Smart Contract” Narrative No Longer Enough?

Perhaps in Vitalik Buterin’s vision, the majority of future Ethereum users might not be “humans,” but AI Agents.

Therefore, this shift in positioning from “world computer” to “bulletin board,” while easily misread as lowering expectations, is actually the opposite.

“World computer” is a narrative from an internal perspective, asking “what can our technology do?” while “bulletin board” is a perspective from external needs, asking “what does the world truly need?”

This insight might also benefit from the people Vitalik encountered at cryptography conferences—those voting system researchers, certificate protocol designers, and privacy tool developers. They have no interest in blockchain or Ethereum, but what they need is precisely what Ethereum can provide.

Therefore, I believe Ethereum is indeed gradually becoming more pragmatic, as this is the proper stance for a mature technology. It no longer tries to define application scenarios but instead polishes itself into a sufficiently reliable piece of infrastructure, waiting for the scenarios that truly need it to naturally emerge.

Just as TCP/IP doesn’t explain what the internet can do, but without TCP/IP, the internet can do nothing.

From this perspective, this is perhaps Ethereum’s moment of “introspection when actions fall short.”

After all, the most core, irreplaceable value of blockchain has always been that truth which is not subject to anyone’s will. That means, no matter how fast AI evolves, no matter how blurred the line between reality and illusion becomes, as long as this bulletin board exists, humanity possesses a place to store “truth.”

This, perhaps, is Ethereum’s most honest self-positioning yet.

यह लेख इंटरनेट से लिया गया है: From “Global Computer/Settlement Layer” to “Bulletin Board”: What Are Ethereum and Vitalik Trying to Achieve?

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