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

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

But on March 12, Vitalik Buterin proposed a refreshing viewpoint—possibly the cryptocurrency industry has overly complicated the practical uses of blockchain; perhaps the most fundamental value of Ethereum is not the smart contract functionality we have always emphasized, but a very simple primitive:

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

Many users may have questions: from "computer" to "bulletin board," is this a degradation of function or are there other considerations?

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

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

It is also quite simple to understand; we can imagine a giant bulletin board posted in the city center, readable by anyone, irrevocable, and unsupervised, which is merely a global bulletin board: global users can confirm that the data indeed exists, even the most powerful government cannot erase it, nor can any administrator prevent you from publishing compliant content.

Ultimately, many current digital systems, such as secure online voting and software version control, do not require complex financial transactions but need a censorship-resistant, publicly verifiable data publishing space, which is precisely the "bulletin board" long sought in the field of cryptography:

• Secure voting systems. Traditional electronic voting relies on centralized databases, which have risks of tampering. Publishing voting records on Ethereum allows anyone to verify the results, while the privacy of ballots is protected through cryptography;
• Certificate revocation systems. The revocation lists of HTTPS certificates and software signing certificates require a publicly searchable, tamper-proof 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 mutual trust; Ethereum can serve as a neutral coordination layer for data publishing and behavior verification;

These scenarios share a common characteristic: they do not need Ethereum to "run" anything, but only require Ethereum to "remember" something. Therefore, Vitalik has 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, with 2024's EIP-4844 (Blob data) being the initial expansion of this bulletin board, and the full implementation of PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) in 2026 will expand the "area" of the bulletin board by a hundredfold. Ethereum is no longer obsessed with the TPS of the main chain but is committed to becoming the largest capacity, most secure evidence center in the world, a foundational layer that provides globally shared data availability.

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

Understanding the essence of the "bulletin board," we now look at the arrival of AI and find that these are not two separate matters but two sides of the same coin.

Objectively speaking, the idea of the "bulletin board" is indeed closely related to the impact AI has on Web3 today. As more and more people interact with AI on a daily basis, the frequency of conversations with AI has surpassed that with any individual person. However, the current AI services tie everything you ask, when you asked it, and how many times you asked it with your real identity.

For example, if you use ChatGPT, you need an email and a credit card; if you call the Claude API, the billing records are crystal clear, every prompt is a digital trace pointing to you.

Thus, Vitalik and Davide Crapis, the AI lead at the Ethereum Foundation, jointly issued a proposal in February 2026: ZK API Usage Credits, aiming to implement anonymous calls to AI large models through zero-knowledge proofs, and the logic of the proposal is straightforward:

Users deposit a sum of money (for instance, 100 USDC) into a smart contract, which logs this deposit on a cryptographically secure list on the chain. From then on, each time an AI API is called, the user does not need to expose their identity; they only need to generate a zero-knowledge proof to show "I have the right to use this credit" to complete the call.

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

At the same time, the proliferation of AI Agents has brought another new problem: how do these automatically running programs achieve economic cooperation with each other? After all, when one AI Agent needs to call the services of another AI Agent, it needs to make payments, establish credibility, and handle disputes. Yet, it does not have a bank account, a legal identity, or any "real name information" that centralized platforms would trust.

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

In a larger framework, this relationship between Ethereum and AI is even merging—when AI capabilities become stronger, the demands for privacy protection, verifiability, and decentralization become more rigid.

Thus, Ethereum is not looking to compete with AI but aims to become the essential infrastructure needed 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" Not Enough?

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

Therefore, this shift in positioning from "world computer" to "bulletin board," while easily misinterpreted as a lowering of expectations, is actually the opposite understanding.

"World computer" is a narrative from an internal perspective asking "what can our technology do," while "bulletin board" is a perspective from external demands asking "what does the world truly need."

This may also benefit from Vitalik's encounter with a group of people at cryptography conferences—those voting system researchers, certificate protocol designers, privacy tool developers—who have no interest in blockchain and Ethereum, but what they need is precisely what Ethereum can provide.

Thus, I believe Ethereum is indeed moving step by step towards a more realistic approach because this is the posture of a mature technology; it no longer tries to define application scenarios but refines itself into a reliable enough infrastructure, waiting for those who truly need it to naturally grow.

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 is also Ethereum's iteration of "when the field has been unable to fulfill its purpose, seek the solution within itself."

After all, the most core, irreplaceable value of blockchain has always been that sense of truth that is not swayed by anyone's will. This means that regardless of how fast AI evolves or how blurred the lines between reality and illusion become, as long as this bulletin board remains, humanity will have a place to store the "truth."

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

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