This week in Eastern Eight Zone time, Vitalik Buterin once again attempted to define the core values of Ethereum for the next decade—not emphasizing "world computer" or single financial infrastructure anymore, but describing Ethereum as a public bulletin board-style global shared memory layer. This statement sharply contrasts with mainstream market perceptions that still linger on the old understanding of "universal smart contract platform and DeFi underlying settlement chain." Accompanied by the PeerDAS upgrade, viewed as a key milestone, and prospects for data availability expansion (the overall status is to be validated), the market generally expects Ethereum to significantly enhance data availability, reduce transaction fees, and unlock new imaginative spaces for more complex cryptographic applications, cross-domain protocols, and on-chain governance. However, the true implications of these changes are far from being merely "cheaper transactions."

From World Computer Illusion to Bulletin Board Reality

● In early narratives, Ethereum was often packaged as a "world computer": a universal smart contract platform capable of executing almost any logic on-chain, envisioned as directly running "decentralized programs" from gaming to social networking and various complex applications. This public-oriented vision was continuously reinforced during the first bull market and developer promotions, leading countless people to believe that Ethereum's ultimate goal was to move all software execution onto the chain.

● With the explosion of DeFi and NFTs, funds and attention concentrated on on-chain trading, clearing, and asset issuance, further simplifying the market's perception of Ethereum's value to just being the "execution layer": whoever can provide higher TPS, and whose transaction fees are lower, is viewed as more competitive. This perspective amplifies the importance of execution performance but somewhat overlooks Ethereum's deeper functions as an underlying data layer and consensus layer.

● In his latest statements, Vitalik emphasized that Ethereum's most fundamental role is not a world computer executing all logic, but rather to provide a global shared data availability layer for protocols including voting, certificate revocation, and version control (the statement overall is still labeled as to be validated). In other words, Ethereum resembles a public information foundation that anyone can write into and anyone can read from.

● This misalignment of new and old perceptions is leading to a clear shift in market and application directions: funds still habitually measure the quality of chains using "on-chain TPS and Gas prices," while developers can easily be led to chase short-term effects of squeezing more business logic "onto the chain," overlooking how to truly leverage Ethereum's unique value in data publication, global state, and consensus through more rational architectural design.

Public Bulletin Board: Ethereum Redefined

● The metaphor of a "public bulletin board" points to an extremely simple yet profoundly powerful infrastructure: anyone can write information on it, and any participant in the network can read it, and once written and achieved consensus, it's difficult to alter or withdraw arbitrarily. It is neither a high-throughput application server nor a specialized high-frequency trading matching system, but a trustworthy announcement layer open to all protocols.

● Within this framework, Vitalik mentioned that Ethereum could provide global shared data availability for voting, certificate revocation, version control, and other protocols (the overall viewpoint is marked as to be validated). The commonality among these applications is that they all require a publicly verifiable record space to publish ballot commitments, certificate status changes, or code version histories, without necessarily requiring all complex logic to be executed step-by-step on the chain, as long as reliable "results" and core states can be posted on the chain.

● Compared to the traditional "ledger" narrative, the "global shared memory layer" emphasizes not merely recording account balances and transfers, but rather a shared state and data structure that can be reused by any protocol or application. Developers not only keep accounts here but also store various key state abstractions, proofs, configurations, and pointers, enabling both off-chain and multi-chain worlds to reach consensus on this data.

● Once the positioning of "public bulletin board" is accepted, Ethereum is no longer merely viewed as a single financial main chain, but more like a fundamental information layer in the internet: providing a unified, censorship-resistant, composable space for states and data publication for protocols in different fields—whether financial, governance, identity, or content distribution. This shifts financial applications off the "protagonist" position, making them one of many bulletin board users.

Data Availability Explosion: DeFi is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

● For Rollup, DeFi protocols, and various complex contracts, data availability is a lifeline: whether computation occurs on-chain or off-chain, as long as the parties involved can reconstruct states and verify results, they must reliably access the relevant data. If Ethereum can significantly expand data availability while ensuring security, it implies support for larger-scale state updates and more complex protocol interactions without squeezing all details into an expensive execution layer.

● The PeerDAS upgrade mentioned in the research brief is regarded as a key milestone on Ethereum's roadmap, yet its specific technical parameters, implementation details, and exact completion status are all labeled as to be validated. Without introducing any specific figures, we can only say that the industry widely sees such upgrades as core steps in expanding Ethereum's data availability capabilities rather than a simple "performance patch."

● The frequent market discussions about "data availability potentially expanding 10-100 times and transaction fees significantly dropping" are similarly clearly labeled in the brief as expectations to be validated, not certainties already implemented. Readers should interpret these figures as optimistic estimates of future directions and potential spaces, rather than quantifiable results already realized to avoid misjudgments in strategy and valuation.

● Once data availability sees a significant enhancement, cryptographic applications outside of DeFi may face a true explosion period: higher frequency and finer-grained zero-knowledge proof releases, more complex on-chain governance records, and richer on-chain identity and reputation systems can all leverage inexpensive and abundant data space to perform heavy computations off-chain while publishing key proofs and state updates to Ethereum as this bulletin board, balancing privacy, verifiability, and cost.

Roadmap Turning Point: Developer Paradigms Are Being Rewritten

● In the new architectural context, the early ideal of "moving all logic onto the chain" is quietly giving way to a realistic paradigm of "settlement and data availability on-chain": applications will migrate more computations to Rollups, specialized execution layers, or off-chain systems, while Ethereum’s mainnet will focus on recording summaries, state roots, and key transactions, allowing the overall system to find a balance between security and scalability.

● The concept of "global shared memory" further encourages developers to view Ethereum as a cross-application public state and data layer: different protocols are no longer isolated black boxes, but can be combined through shared state structures, universal proof formats, and unified bulletin boards. A state written by one application can be securely referenced by a protocol from a completely different domain, thus creating cross-application compounding effects.

● Specifically in architectural practice, the future mainstream application form will likely be: a business execution layer dominated by Rollup and off-chain logic, responsible for high-frequency interactions and complex calculations; while Ethereum will take on the role of data publication and consensus layer, periodically receiving state roots, proofs, and key transactions, inscribing this information onto the public bulletin board to ensure all participants can rebuild and verify system states if necessary.

● This paradigm shift will inevitably change the mindset of DApp design: past developers often thought about products around "how to maximize on-chain execution and increase interaction stickiness," whereas today there is a greater need to focus on "how to optimize data writing and reading patterns," to reduce meaningless on-chain burdens, treating each write operation as a scarce resource designed carefully regarding data structure and update frequency under the premise of ensuring security and verifiability.

Cognitive Lag and Pricing Games: The Market Still Defines Ethereum Under Old Frameworks

● On funding and public opinion levels, mainstream perspectives still habitually use "on-chain TPS, per transaction fees, and user experience smoothness" for short-term judgments, even simply aligning these indicators against various high-performance public chains to project the so-called narrative of "Ethereum being replaced." This variance, which solely uses execution performance as the benchmark, naturally overlooks the long-term value carried by the bulletin board and data availability layers.

● If the market systematically underestimates Ethereum's value as a public bulletin board and data availability layer, it could lead to significant long-term pricing deviations: on-chain activities may look less lively than high TPS public chains in the short term, but their status in Rollups, cross-application state sharing, and cryptographic infrastructure may continue to accumulate over longer periods, ultimately reshaping value through ecosystem stickiness and protocol dependencies.

● Against the backdrop of the rise of L2 and various modular DA solutions, Ethereum needs to maintain its network effects in the dual role of "settlement layer + bulletin board": on one hand, becoming the final settlement place for high-value states and assets, and on the other hand, serving as a public data publication layer relied upon by multiple chains and Rollups. As long as the latter's position is solid enough, even if some execution traffic spills over, its core hub status is still hard to shake.

● Around this new narrative, different participants' positions are differentiating: developers focus more on long-term architectural rationality and composability, tending to embrace the bulletin board perspective; short-term speculators still trade around Gas, TPS, and current activity levels; while long-term holders need to make judgments between the two sets of logic, deciding whether to continue valuing with the old "execution performance" framework or shift to a pricing model for Ethereum rooted in "data availability infrastructure" and "global shared memory."

The Bulletin Board Era Begins: The Next Act of Ethereum

With Vitalik representing the core developers, the re-emphasis on "public bulletin board, global shared memory layer" is a clear restructuring of Ethereum's core value, directly challenging the narrative of "world computer, universal smart contract platform" that has formed in the industry for years. When attention shifts from on-chain execution performance to the underlying information layer, it becomes evident that what truly matters may not be "how many contracts can run," but rather "how many critical states and proof choices are written to this bulletin board."

With expectations of continuously expanding data availability, DeFi is likely just the tip of the iceberg: larger-scale zero-knowledge proof systems, more complex on-chain governance, and more refined on-chain identity and reputation networks all have opportunities to redraw the map in a low-cost, highly reliable data publication environment, evolving Ethereum from a "financial main chain" into a foundational information layer supporting multiple protocol forms. For readers, reevaluating Ethereum requires adopting at least two parallel perspectives: one is the traditional execution performance perspective, examining its performance in end-user experiences and DeFi activity; the other is the more underlying data availability infrastructure perspective, considering how many high-value applications, Rollups, and cryptographic protocols rely on Ethereum as an irreplaceable bulletin board.

It is important to emphasize that specific upgrade statuses, the extent of data availability improvements, and related technical details, including PeerDAS, still have a lot of key information marked as to be further disclosed and validated. This subsequent information will continue to shape the market's understanding of "Ethereum in the bulletin board era" and will repeatedly drive iterations in pricing logic and developer paradigms over the next few years.

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