Vitalik: Ethereum's essence is "world computer", and continuous improvements to the Ethereum protocol and infrastructure are still needed

March 12, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted: “I recently attended Real World Crypto and its affiliated events, which helped me gain a clearer understanding of blockchain use cases. Where can Ethereum create the most value? Based on my experience at these events, the first answer isn’t what you’d expect. It’s neither smart contracts nor payments—instead, it’s what cryptographers call a ‘public bulletin board.’ “Ethereum has significant value. If you step back and look at it from first principles—purely as a technical tool: global shared memory—you can grasp its value. I think the main bottleneck holding this use case back is that the world hasn’t realized we’re no longer in the 2020-2022 era. Today, transaction fees are extremely low, and we have a robust scalability roadmap to ensure fees stay low even if usage surges sharply. The infrastructure is also more mature when it comes to shielding users from fee volatility. “Treating Ethereum’s blobs as a bulletin board, ETH as an asset and universal payment backup, and Ethereum smart contracts as a shared programming layer—all of this aligns perfectly with the decentralized, private, secure open-source software stack concept. That said, we need to keep improving the Ethereum protocol and infrastructure to make it truly efficient across all these scenarios.”