Written by: imToken

In many people's traditional understanding, Ethereum's core positioning has always been "world computer" or "global settlement layer."

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

However, on March 12, Vitalik Buterin put forward a rather refreshing perspective— the crypto industry may have overcomplicated the actual use of blockchain; perhaps Ethereum's fundamental value is not the smart contract functionality we have always emphasized, but rather an extremely simple primitive:

A globally shared "public bulletin board" in a cryptographic sense.

Many users may have questions about this shift from "computer" to "bulletin board." Is this a degeneration of functionality, or is there another angle to consider?

1. The "Global Shared Memory" Behind the "Bulletin Board"

The so-called "public bulletin board" literally means data availability.

It's easy to understand; we can imagine a giant bulletin board posted in the central square of a city where anyone can read it, it cannot be withdrawn, and there is no review — and this simply refers to a globally significant bulletin board: global users can confirm that the data indeed exists; even the most powerful government cannot erase it, nor is there an administrator who can stop you from publishing compliant content.

Ultimately, many digital systems today, such as secure online voting and software version control, have a core requirement that is not complex financial transactions, but rather a censorship-resistant, publicly verifiable data publishing space, which is precisely the "bulletin board" sought after in the field of cryptography:

• Secure voting systems. Traditional electronic voting relies on centralized databases, which can be altered. Publishing voting records on Ethereum allows anyone to verify the results while protecting the privacy of ballots through cryptography;
• Certificate revocation systems. The revocation lists of HTTPS certificates and software signing certificates require a public, verifiable, and tamper-proof data source. Blockchain is inherently suitable for this role;
• Multi-party coordination and governance. Open-source projects, decentralized governance, community funds — these scenarios require multiple parties to collaborate without mutual trust, and Ethereum can act as a neutral coordination layer to publish data and verify actions;

These scenarios share a common feature: they do not require Ethereum to "run" anything, but rather need Ethereum to "remember" something. Vitalik therefore provided a more precise ultimate definition: Ethereum is global shared memory.

Anyone can write, anyone can read, and no one can unilaterally erase it. Not a company, not a government, and not even Vitalik himself.

This positioning corresponds to a clear technical path. The EIP-4844 (Blob data) in 2024 marks the initial expansion of this bulletin board, and the fully implemented PeerDAS (peer data availability sampling) in 2026 will increase the "area" of the bulletin board a hundred-fold. Ethereum is no longer obsessed with the TPS of the main chain but is committed to becoming the largest and most secure proof center in the world, a foundational layer providing global shared data availability.

2. With AI Arriving, Public Bulletin Boards Become More Necessary

With an understanding of the essence of the "bulletin board," looking at the arrival of AI reveals that these are not two separate things but two sides of the same coin.

Objectively speaking, the concept of the "bulletin board" is indeed closely related to the current impact of AI on Web3. Increasingly, the number of conversations people have with AI every day has surpassed the number of interactions they have with any single person, but current AI services bind your inquiries — what you asked, when you asked it, and how many times — to your real identity.

For instance, using ChatGPT requires an email and a credit card; when you call the Claude API, the billing records are clear, with each prompt leaving a digital trace pointing to you.

Therefore, Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation's AI head Davide Crapis jointly released a proposal in February 2026 called ZK API Usage Credits, aimed at achieving anonymous calls to AI large models through zero-knowledge proofs. The logic of the proposal is also quite clear:

Users deposit a sum of money (for example, 100 USDC) into a smart contract, which records this deposit in an encrypted list on the blockchain. Each time they call the AI API thereafter, users do not need to expose their identity; they only need to generate a zero-knowledge proof to demonstrate "I have the right to use this amount" to complete the call.

What does this proposal require? It requires a public bulletin board, a publicly verifiable and tamper-proof data layer to record "who has how much credit" without recording "who is who."

At the same time, the popularization of AI agents brings another new question: how can these automatically operating programs complete economic collaboration between each other? After all, when one AI agent needs to call another AI agent's service, it needs to pay, establish credibility, and handle disputes, but it has no bank account, no legal identity, and no "real name information" that could be trusted by centralized platforms.

As a layer for economic coordination of AI agents, Ethereum provides a natural answer; agents can initiate transactions on-chain, stake collateral, and establish verifiable reputation records, all of which are built on the transparent data layer provided by that "bulletin board."

In a broader framework, the relationship between Ethereum and AI is even seen as integrated — as AI capabilities grow stronger, the demands for privacy protection, verifiability, and decentralization become increasingly rigid.

Thus, Ethereum is not competing with AI but 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 Narrative of "Smart Contracts" No Longer Enough?

Perhaps in Vitalik Buterin's vision, most future Ethereum users may not be "humans" but AI agents.

Therefore, this shift from "world computer" to "bulletin board," although easily misinterpreted 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 derived from external needs, asking "What does the world really need?"

This may also be attributed to the group of people Vitalik encountered at the cryptography conference — those researchers of voting systems, designers of certificate protocols, and developers of privacy tools, who had no interest in blockchain and Ethereum, but the things they needed just happened to be what Ethereum could provide.

Therefore, I believe Ethereum is indeed gradually moving towards a more realistic path, as that is the stance mature technology should adopt, no longer trying to define application scenarios but instead honing itself into a sufficiently reliable infrastructure, waiting for those scenarios that truly need it to grow naturally.

Just like TCP/IP does not explain what the internet can do, but without TCP/IP, the internet can do nothing.

From this perspective, this might as well be Ethereum's moment of "acting without obtainment, seeking for oneself."

After all, the most core and irreplaceable value of blockchain is always that undeniable truth, which means that no matter how fast AI evolves or how blurred the boundaries between reality and illusion become, as long as this bulletin board exists, humanity has a place to store "truth."

This may indeed be Ethereum's most honest self-positioning.

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