PANews reported on March 12 that Vitalik Buterin recently published an article stating that Ethereum's core purpose is not smart contracts or payments, but rather to act as a "public bulletin board," providing a publicly readable and writable data availability layer for cryptographic protocols such as voting, certificate revocation, and version control. He also stated that ETH can serve as an anti-Syllabic payment tool, while smart contracts are a shared programming layer and a tool for executing deposits.