ChainThink message, March 12: Ethereum founder Vitalik posted that "recently attending Real World Crypto and related events has given me a clearer understanding of blockchain's utility. Where does Ethereum create the most value? The initial answer from these events is actually not what you might expect—it's neither smart contracts nor payments, but rather what cryptographers call a 'public bulletin board.'

Ethereum holds significant value; if we step back and examine it from first principles, viewing it purely as a technological tool—global shared memory—we can grasp its worth. I suspect a major bottleneck limiting further expansion of this use case lies in the fact that the world hasn't yet realized we are no longer in the 2020–2022 phase. Transaction fees are now extremely low, and we have stronger scalability roadmaps in place to ensure fees remain low even if usage surges dramatically. Infrastructure has also matured in shielding users from fee volatility.

Viewing Ethereum's blobs as a bulletin board, ETH as an asset and a universal payment fallback mechanism, and Ethereum smart contracts as a shared programming layer—all align perfectly with the ethos of decentralized, private, secure open-source software stacks. Yet we must continue improving the Ethereum protocol and infrastructure to ensure it operates truly efficiently across all these scenarios."