Vitalik Highlights Ethereum’s Role in Cryptographic Infra

Key Highlights

• In the latest post, Vitalik Buterin stated that Ethereum’s top role is a “public bulletin board.”
• He highlighted the blockchain’s usefulness for things like secure voting, certificate revocation, or tamper-proof software updates, instead of only focusing on smart contracts or payments
• The PeerDAS upgrade has increased Ethereum’s data availability by 2.3 times

On March 12, Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, shared a post on X (formerly Twitter), where he once again shared his views on developers’ focus on identifying Ethereum’s true potential for cryptography infrastructure. 

He shared this post after returning from the Real World Crypto summit in Taipei, Taiwan, which was held between March 9 and March 11. This event was mainly attended by cryptography experts who are working on real-world tools instead of only focusing on the cryptocurrency hype. 

Vitalik Asks Community to Choose Data Availability Over Smart Contracts on Ethereum

In the post, Buterin stated that blockchain communities are mostly focusing on how they make use of everything on Ethereum. Instead, he urged the community to step back and treat Ethereum as one tool among “sanctuary tech” and “CROP tech.” This would make it a censorship-resistant, open-source, private, and secure system that protects users from corporate or government controls. 

Vitalik Buterin stated in the tweet, “For a moment, let us forget that we are ‘the Ethereum community’. Rather, we are maintainers of the Ethereum tool, and members of the {CROPS (censorship-resistant, open-source, private, secure) tech | sanctuary tech | non-corposlop tech | d/acc | …} community. Going in with zero attachment to Ethereum specifically, and entering a context (like RWC) where there are people with in-principle aligned values but no blockchain baggage, can we re-derive from zero in what places Ethereum adds the most value?”

He mentioned that the main focus in cryptography is not complex code or instant payments. The main purpose is a globally readable and publicly writable place to post small pieces of data that no one can erase or fake. 

What these systems really need is a way to store data reliably. This is known as a “public bulletin board.” They do not require large computing power. Ethereum is already providing this through its system for making data available to everyone. 

Just a few months ago, the upgrade called Fusaka introduced a feature known as PeerDAS. Instead of forcing every participant to download all the information, they can now check just a small portion of it. This change has increased the network’s capacity by more than double. Apart from this, future updates are expected to make it around 10 to 100 times more powerful. 

He also shared his views on private applications. According to him, Many private applications, like messaging services and AI tools, need a way to stop spam without forcing users to sign up with a phone number or login. Ethereum can do this by combining special payment channels that protect privacy. It allows someone to deposit money once, and provides they’ve paid for thousands of individual requests without revealing who they are. 

Vitalik Buterin stated in the post on X, “for every use case other than use cases handling ETH itself, the smart contracts are” just a convenience”: you could just use the chain as a bulletin board, and use ZK-SNARKs to provide the results of any computations over it. But in practice, standardizing such things is hard, and you get the most interoperability if you just take the same mechanism that enables programs to control ETH, and let other digital objects use it too.”

Ethereum is continuously working on the concepts to boost its real-world adoption. Whether it’s tokenized real-world assets or stablecoins, it is largely dominating these new sectors. According to rwa.xyz, Ethereum is dominating the RWA sector by capturing a 57% share of the total market. Similarly, Ethereum alone is holding $161.569 billion in stablecoin market capitalization from the total market capitalization of $320 billion.

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